least, the order in which they come, but some
of them are fixed well enough in my memory; and, principally, a bishop,
(St. Firmin), preaching, rising out of a pulpit from the midst of the
crowd, in his jewelled cope and mitre, and with a beautiful sweet face.
Then another, the baptising of the king and his lords, was very quaint
and lifelike. I remember, too, something about the finding of St.
Firmin's relics, and the translation of the same relics when found; the
many bishops, with their earnest faces, in the first, and the priests,
bearing the reliquaries, in the second; with their long vestments girded
at the waist and falling over their feet, painted too, in light colours,
with golden flowers on them. I wish I remembered these carvings better,
I liked them so much. Just about this place, in the lower part of the
screen, I remember the tomb of a priest, very gorgeous, with gold and
colours; he lay in a deep niche, under a broad segmental arch, which is
painted with angels; and, outside this niche, angels were drawing back
painted curtains, I am sorry to say. But the priest lay there in cope
and alb, and the gentle colour lay over him, as his calm face gazed ever
at the angels painted in his resting place. I have dim recollection of
seeing, when I was at Amiens before, not this last time, a tomb, which I
liked much, a bishop, I think it was, lying under a small round arch, but
I forget the figure now. This was in a chapel on the other side of the
choir. It is very hard to describe the interior of a great church like
this, especially since the whitewash (applied, as I said, on this scale
in 1771) lies on everything so; before that time, some book says, the
church was painted from end to end with patterns of flowers and stars,
and histories: think--I might have been able to say something about it
then, with that solemn glow of colour all about me, as I walked there
from sunrise to sunset; and yet, perhaps, it would have filled my heart
too full for speaking, all that beauty; I know not.

Up into the triforium, and other galleries, sometimes in the church,
sometimes in narrow passages of close-fitting stone, sometimes out in the
open air; up into the forest of beams between the slates and the real
stone roof: one can look down through a hole in the vaulting and see the
people walking and praying on the pavement below, looking very small from
that height, and strangely foreshortened. A strange sense of oppression