re lies the chief Apostle, and there lie many martyred bishops
side by side; men who came from far lands to die the holy death in
Rome,--from Athens, from Bethlehem, from Syria, from Africa. There lie
the last of the Stuarts, with their pitiful kingly names, James the
Third, Charles the Third, and Henry the Ninth; the Emperor Otho the
Second has lain there a thousand years; Pope Boniface the Eighth of the
Caetani, whom Sciarra Colonna took prisoner at Anagni, is there, and
Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander the Sixth, lay there awhile, and Agnes
Colonna, and Queen Christina of Sweden, and the Great Countess, and
many more besides, both good and bad--even to Catharine Cornaro, Queen
of Cyprus, of romantic memory. In the high clear air above, it chills
one to think of the death silence down there in the crypt; but when you
enter the church again after the long descent, and feel once more the
quick change of atmosphere by which a blind man could tell that he was
in Saint Peter's, you feel also the spell of the place and its ancient
enchantment; you do not regret the high view you left above, and the
dead under your feet seem all at once near and friendly.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SAINT PETER'S]

It is not an exaggeration or the misuse of a word to call it magic.
Magic is supposed to be a means of communication with beings of another
world. It is scarcely a metaphor to say that Saint Peter's is that. It
is the mere truth and no more, and you can feel that it is if you will
stand, with half-closed eyes, against one of the great pillars, just
within hearing of the voices that sing solemn music in the chapel of the
choir, and make yourself a day-dream of the people that go up the nave
by seeing them a little indistinctly. If you will but remember how much
humanity is like humanity in all ages, you can see the old life again as
it was a hundred years--two, three, five, ten hundred years before that.
If you are fortunate, just then, a score of German seminary students may
pass you, in their scarlet cloth gowns, marching two and two in order,
till they wheel by the right and go down upon their knees with military
precision before the gate of the Chapel of the Sacrament. Or if it be
the day and hour, a procession crosses the church, with lights and song
and rich vestments, and a canopy over the Sacred Host, which the
Cardinal Archpriest himself is carrying reverently before him with
upraised hands hidden under the cope, while the censer