teristically at Ara Coeli, one of the churches
here I like best, or rather one of the few I like at all. I find that
the pleasure I derive from churches is mainly due to their being the
most _inhabited_ things in the world: inhabited by generation after
generation, each bringing its something grand or paltry like its
feelings, sometimes things stolen from previous generations like the
rites themselves with their Pagan and Hebrew colour; bringing
something, sticking in something, regardless of crowding (as life is
ever regardless of other life): tombs, pictures, silver hearts and
votive pictures of accidents and illnesses, paper flowers, marbled
woodwork pews, hangings. And each generation also wearing something
away, the bricks and marble discs into unevenness, the columns into
polish, effacing with their tread the egotism of the effigies,
reducing them to that mere film, mere outline of rigid feet,
cushioned head and folded hands which is so pious and pathetic.

Such a church as Ara Coeli--like those of Ravenna--has this character
all the more, that its very pillars are stolen from antique edifices,
and show, in their broken flutings or scarred granite, that the
weather also has felt its feelings about them, that they have shared
in the life not merely of this religion or of that, Pagan or
Christian, but in the life of the winds and rains. Such churches as
this, anything but swept and garnished, correspond in a way to
Browning's poetry; there is the high solemnity brought home to you,
not disturbed, by the very triviality of the details; mysteries and
wonders overarching the real living life of ex-votos and pictures of
runaway horses and houses on fire; the life worn like the porphyry
discs of the pavement, precious bits trodden into the bricks, the life
of the present filched out of the past, like the columns of the temple
supporting arches painted with seventeenth-century saints.

The organ was playing to the chanting of the monks; and standing
before the chapel of S. Bernardino, where the Christ in the gold
almond and the worshipping and music-making angels of Pinturicchio
rise out of the blue darkness behind the grating, I felt oddly that
music of the organ. The sonorous rasping of the bass tubes, the
somewhat nasal quaver of the vox humana and the hautboy, was actually
the music made by these beribboned Umbrian angels, those long ages
ago, in the gloom of their blue cloudy sky, with the blessing, newly
arisen Ch