to-day
apparent that certain others, which must have cut into the front still
more, have been cleared away. Clearly, with all its charm and beauty of
detail, it is for its great and general excellencies that the cathedral
at Chartres most impresses itself upon the memory.

Visitors to-day will have no easy task in locating Lowell's "little
pea-green inn," in which he indited the lines, "A Day in Chartres;" as
appreciative and graceful an estimate of an inanimate thing as ever was
made in verse:

"The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness
Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained,
The one thing finished in this hasty world.
But ah! this other, this that never ends,
Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb,
As full of morals, half divined, as life,
Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise
Of hazardous caprices, sure to please,
Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern,
Imagination's very self in stone."

Among the other attractions of the west facade is the Porte Royale, so
called, the central doorway which was only opened for the entrance of
the sovereign. It is decorated with the "signs of the zodiac" and
"symbols of the months." Next in point of richness are the grandly
effective north and south porches, with their triple doorways or
portals, setting back some twenty feet from their jambs, which, as at
Noyon, and in the smaller church at Louviers, are pierced with a
transverse passage.

The north porch, with its range of three open-sided and deeply recessed
doorways, has unmistakably debased tendencies, but is filled with
sculptured statuary of more than ordinarily effective disposition, more
remarkable for magnitude and ornateness than for finesse of skill and
workmanship, or even as a detail of good taste.

The life-size statues of all three recesses are held aloft by pedestals,
on pillars of twisted and of spiralled trunks, a formation reviled by
Ruskin, but producing an effect much more pleasing than some galleries
of effigies we have seen, where the figures appear as if hung up by the
hair of their heads, or are clinging to the walls by invisible spurs at
their heels, or, as is not infrequently the case, are standing or hung
on nothing, as though they were graven of some bewitched magnetic stone.
Here for the first time is seen, in the sculptured figures of the three
great portals, the plastic forms which were to add so greatly to the
Gothic architecture: male an