aces, the darkest one, on
account of the rains beating on that side. It is made to look blacker
and bigger by being surrounded with light and low buildings. With its
carved stonework, its rusty tone, its blue and lustrous roof, its
colossal tower where the golden disk and the golden needles of its
dial glitter in the stone discoloured by the vapours from the Scheldt
and by the winters, it assumes monstrous proportions. When the sky is
troubled, as it is to-day, it adds all its own strange caprices to the
grandeur of the lines. Imagine then the invention of a Gothic Piranesi,
exaggerated by the fancy of the North, wildly illuminated by a stormy
day, and standing out in irregular blotches against the scenic
background of a sky entirely black or entirely white, and full of
tempest. A more original or more striking preliminary stage-setting
could not be contrived. Thus it is vain for you to have come from
Mechlin or Brussels, to have seen the _Magi_ and the _Calvary_, to have
formed an exact and measured idea of Rubens, or even to have taken
familiarities in examining him that have set you at your ease with him,
for you cannot enter Notre Dame as you enter a museum.

It is three o'clock; the clock high up has just struck. Scarcely even a
sacristan makes a sound in the tranquil, clean and clear naves, as
Pieter Neefs has represented them, with an inimitable feeling for their
solitude and grandeur. It is raining and the light is fading. Shadows
and gleams succeed each other upon the two triptychs in their thin
framing of brown wood fastened without any pomp to the cold and smooth
walls of the transepts, and this proud painting only stands out the more
amid the violent lights and obscurities contending around it. German
copyists have placed their easels before the _Descent from the Cross_;
there is nobody before the _Elevation to the Cross_. This simple fact
expresses the world's opinion as to these two works.

They are greatly admired, almost unreservedly so, and the fact is rare
in the case of Rubens, but the admiration is divided. The chief renown
has fallen upon the _Descent from the Cross_. The _Elevation to the
Cross_ has the gift of touching still more the impassioned, or more
deeply convinced, friends of Rubens. No two works, in fact, could
resemble each other less than these that were conceived at an interval
of two years, that were inspired by the same effort of mind, and that,
nevertheless, so plainly bear the mark