the whole height of the
towers, above and around the entrance, and all over the walls: most of
them empty, but a few containing the lamentable remnants of headless
saints and angels. It is singular what a native animosity lives in the
human heart against carved images, insomuch that, whether they represent
Christian saint or Pagan deity, all unsophisticated men seize the first
safe opportunity to knock off their heads! In spite of all dilapidations,
however, the effect of the west front of the Cathedral is still
exceedingly rich, being covered from massive base to airy summit with the
minutest details of sculpture and carving: at least, it was so once; and
even now the spiritual impression of its beauty remains so strong, that we
have to look twice to see that much of it has been obliterated. I have
seen a cherry-stone carved all over by a monk, so minutely that it must
have cost him half a lifetime of labor; and this cathedral front seems to
have been elaborated in a monkish spirit, like that cherry-stone. Not that
the result is in the least petty, but miraculously grand, and all the more
so for the faithful beauty of the smallest details.

An elderly man, seeing us looking up at the west front, came to the door
of an adjacent house, and called to inquire if we wished to go into the
Cathedral; but as there would have been a dusky twilight beneath its roof,
like the antiquity that has sheltered itself within, we declined for the
present. So we merely walked round the exterior, and thought it more
beautiful than that of York; though, on recollection, I hardly deem it so
majestic and mighty as that. It is vain to attempt a description, or seek
even to record the feeling which the edifice inspires. It does not impress
the beholder as an inanimate object, but as something that has a vast,
quiet, long-enduring life of its own,--a creation which man did not build,
though in some way or other it is connected with him, and kindred to human
nature. In short, I fall straightway to talking nonsense, when I try to
express my inner sense of this and other cathedrals.

While we stood in the close, at the eastern end of the Minster, the clock
chimed the quarters; and then Great Tom, who hangs in the Rood Tower, told
us it was eight o'clock, in far the sweetest and mightiest accents that I
ever heard from any bell,--slow, and solemn, and allowing the profound
reverberations of each stroke to die away before the next one fell. It was
st