in, what the
architect was working for, and what his buttresses and traceries mean.
For the outside of a French cathedral, except for its sculpture, is
always to be thought of as the wrong side of the stuff, in which you
find how the threads go that produce the inside or right-side pattern.
And if you have no wonder in you for that choir and its encompassing
circlet of light, when you look up into it from the cross-centre, you
need not travel farther in search of cathedrals, for the waiting-room of
any station is a better place for you;--but, if it amaze you and delight
you at first, then, the more you know of it, the more it will amaze. For
it is not possible for imagination and mathematics together, to do
anything nobler or stronger than that procession of window, with
material of glass and stone--nor anything which shall look loftier, with
so temperate and prudent measure of actual loftiness.

[Footnote 45: See, however, pages 32 and 130 (Sec.Sec. 36, 112-114) of the
octavo edition of 'The Two Paths.']

9. From the pavement to the keystone of its vault is but 132 French
feet--about 150 English. Think only--you who have been in
Switzerland,--the Staubbach falls _nine_ hundred! Nay, Dover cliff
under the castle, just at the end of the Marine Parade, is twice as
high; and the little cockneys parading to military polka on the
asphalt below, think themselves about as tall as it, I suppose,--nay,
what with their little lodgings and stodgings and podgings about it,
they have managed to make it look no bigger than a moderate-sized
limekiln. Yet it is twice the height of Amiens' apse!--and it takes
good building, with only such bits of chalk as one can quarry beside
Somme, to make your work stand half that height, for six hundred
years.

10. It takes good building, I say, and you may even aver the
best--that ever was, or is again likely for many a day to be, on the
unquaking and fruitful earth, where one could calculate on a pillar's
standing fast, once well set up; and where aisles of aspen, and
orchards of apple, and clusters of vine, gave type of what might be
most beautifully made sacred in the constancy of sculptured stone.
From the unhewn block set on end in the Druid's Bethel, to _this_
Lord's House and blue-vitrailed gate of Heaven, you have the entire
course and consummation of the Northern Religious Builder's passion
and art.

11. But, note further--and earnestly,--this apse of Amiens is not only
the best, but