regret their absence, especially
with visitors from England, where indeed cathedral and other towers are
apt to be good, and really make their mark. Robert de Luzarches and
his successors aimed rather at the domical outline, with its central
point at the centre of the church, in the spire or fleche. The existing
spire is a wonderful mass of carpentry [124] of the beginning of the
sixteenth century, at which time the lead that carefully wraps every
part of it was heavily gilt. The great western towers are lost in the
west front, the grandest, perhaps the earliest, example of its
species--three profound, sculptured portals; a double gallery above,
the upper gallery carrying colossal images of twenty-two kings of the
House of Judah, ancestors of Our Lady; then the great rose; above it
the ringers' gallery, half masking the gable of the nave, and uniting
at their top-most storeys the twin, but not exactly equal or similar,
towers, oddly oblong in plan, as if never intended to carry pyramids or
spires. They overlook an immense distance in those flat, peat-digging,
black and green regions, with rather cheerless rivers, and are the
centre of an architectural region wider still--of a group to which
Soissons, far beyond the woods of Compiegne, belongs, with St. Quentin,
and, towards the west, a too ambitious rival, Beauvais, which has stood
however--what we now see of it--for six centuries.

It is a spare, rather sad world at most times that Notre-Dame d'Amiens
thus broods over; a country with little else to be proud of; the sort
of world, in fact, which makes the range of conceptions embodied in
these cliffs of quarried and carved stone all the more welcome as a
hopeful complement to the meagreness of most people's present
existence, and its apparent ending in a [125] sparely built coffin
under the flinty soil, and grey, driving sea-winds. In Notre-Dame,
therefore, and her sisters, there is not only a common method of
construction, a single definable type, different from that of other
French latitudes, but a correspondent common sentiment also; something
which speaks, amid an immense achievement just here of what is
beautiful and great, of the necessity of an immense effort in the
natural course of things, of what you may see quaintly designed in one
of those hieroglyphic carvings--radix de terra sitienti: "a root out of
a dry ground."

NOTES

109. *Published in the Nineteenth Century, March 1894, and now
reprinted by t