contemporary of Chaucer and Wyclif,--who flourished in the
fourteenth century, and who built Winchester Cathedral; a great and
benevolent prelate, who also founded other colleges and schools. But I
merely allude to him, since my subject is the art to which he gave an
impulse, rather than any single individual. No one man represents church
architecture any more appropriately than any one man represents the
Feudal system, or Monasticism, or the Crusades, or the French
Revolution.

I do not think the English cathedrals are equal to those of Cologne,
Rheims, Amiens, and Rouen; but they are full of interest, and they have
varied excellences. That of Salisbury is the only one which is of
uniform style. Its glory is in its spire, as that of Lincoln is in its
west front, and that of Westminster is in its nave. Gloucester is
celebrated for its choir, and York for its tower. In all are beautiful
vistas of pillars and arches. But they lack the inspiration of the
Catholic Church. They are indeed hoary monuments, petrified mysteries, a
"passion of stone," as Michelet speaks of the marble histories which
will survive his rhapsodies. They alike show the pilgrimage of humanity
through gloomy centuries. If their great wooden screens were removed,
which separate the choir from the nave, the cathedrals doubtless would
appear to more advantage, and especially if they were filled with altars
and shrines and pictures, and lighted candles on the altars,--filled
also with crowds of worshippers, reverent before the gorgeously attired
ministers of Divine Omnipotence, and excited by transporting chants, and
the various appeals to sense and imagination. The reason must be
assisted by the imagination, before the mind can revel in the glories of
Gothic architecture. Imagination intensifies all our pleasures, even
those of sense; and without imagination--yea, a memory stored with the
pious deeds of saints and martyrs in bygone ages--a Gothic cathedral is
as much a sealed book as Wordsworth is to Taine. The Protestant tourist
from Michigan or Pennsylvania can "do" any cathedral in two hours, and
wonder why they make such a fuss about a church not half so large as
the New York Central Railroad station. The wonders of cathedrals must be
studied, like the glories of a landscape, with an eye to the beautiful
and the grand, cultured and practised by the contemplation of ideal
excellence, when the mind summons the imagination to its aid, with all
the poetry