The very richness of the work, the seemingly lavish
tracery, the perforated ornaments behind the spring of the main arches,
all help to weld it into one abiding whole. It is a fit type of the
noble strength of perfect unity. For, so say the masons, if one stone
were to give away, if one pendant were to fall, the whole roof would
collapse.

Nothing gives one a just idea of the awful weight of stone in that roof
until one has climbed above it. Would that I could take you, my readers,
as I have taken more than one American child, for a wander about the
roofs of the Abbey. It is a world within a world. Do not fancy it is
all dark and dirty and terrific. Not at all. I know few more charming
excursions. A little door in the corner of the north transept lets us
into a turret staircase. Up and up it winds, round the solid smooth
shaft of stone, till we reach the Triforium. This is the row of double
trefoil-headed arches that runs all around the Abbey above the great
pier-arches. From below you think, how frightful to be up on that narrow
ledge, clinging to the wall. But when you get up to it you find it
anything but a narrow ledge. It is a grand gallery twenty feet wide,
large enough to drive a coach and four along it, and lighted at many
points by rose-windows in the outer walls. The double arches and slender
pillars which look so beautiful from the ground, are just as interesting
when seen close. Hardly two of them are alike; the builders of those
days did their work in no grudging spirit: but lavished fresh designs
upon every yard.

It is a strange sensation up aloft in this wide gallery, looking down a
sheer sixty feet into the Abbey, peeping at the stalls of the choir
peering down the pipes of the organ, watching the people wandering like
flies over the pavement below us. But the strangest experience of all is
an excursion such as I am describing at night. One such wandering is
specially impressed on my memory. Some American friends were with us;
and lighted by one little lantern we threaded our way through the
darkness, through the solemn stillness of the wonderful building, and
came out into the Triforium. Then suddenly three or four clear rich
voices, one of which is well-known to all who frequent the services at
Westminster, came floating up from the gulf of gloom beneath us,
singing,

Lift thine eyes, oh! lift thine eyes to the mountains,
whence cometh help.

I do not think any one of us will ever forget