receives
the most vivid impressions. Though the mind may be overcome by a feeling
of superhuman effort on entering the portals of Notre Dame de Paris, yet
the emotion produced by the first sight of the queenly, celestial
edifice from the opposite side of the broad square is the more powerful
and eloquent. Not so in Spain,--and this in spite of the location of the
choirs. It is not until you enter a Spanish church that its power and
beauty are felt.

The audacious construction of Leon, which one wonders at from the square
outside, becomes well-nigh incredible when seen from the nave. How is it
possible that glass can support such a weight of stone? If Burgos was
bold, this is insane. It looks as unstable as a house of cards, ready
for a collapse at the first gentle breeze. Can fields of glass sustain
three hundred feet of thrusts and such weights of stone? It is a
culmination of the daring of Spanish Gothic. In France there was this
difference,--while the fields of glass continued to grow larger and
larger, the walls to diminish, and the piers to become slenderer, the
aid of a more perfectly developed system of counterthrusts to the
vaulting was called in. In Spain we reach the maximum of elimination in
the masonry of the side walls at the end of the thirteenth century, and
in the Cathedral of Leon, whereas later Gothic work, as in portions of
Burgos and Toledo, shows a sense of the futile exaggeration towards
which they were drifting, as well as the impracticability of so much
glass from a climatic point of view.

Internally, Leon is the lightest and most cheerful church in Spain. The
great doorways of the western and southern fronts, as well as that to
the north leading into the cloisters, are thrown wide open, as if to add
to the joyousness of the temple. Every portion of it is flooded with
sweet sunlight and freshness. It is the church of cleanliness, of light
and fresh air, and above all, of glorious color. The glaziers might have
said with Isaiah, "And I will make thy windows of agates and thy gates
of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones." The entire walls
are a continuous series of divine rainbows.

The side walls of the aisles for a height of some fourteen feet to the
bottom of their vaulting ribs, the triforium, commencing but a foot
above the arches which separate nave from side aisles, and immediately
above the triforium, forty feet of clerestory,--all is glass, emerald,
turquoise, and peaco