erly fail to take it in all at once; your gaze is
arrested by ponderous columns and you must be content to see it in
fragments. You yourself seem so lost in its immensity, that you find it
impossible to take in its immeasurable vastness from any single
standpoint, the mind utterly refusing to grasp it; but on a second and
third visit, you gradually obtain a more comprehensive idea of its
proportions.

"Thy mind,
Expanded by the genius of the spot,
Has grown colossal....

"Thou movest, but increasing with the advance,
Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise,
Deceived by its gigantic elegance;
Vastness which grows, but grows to harmonize,
All musical in its immensities:
Rich marbles, richer painting, shrines where flame
The lamps of gold, and haughty dome which vies
In air with earth's chief structures, though the frame
Sits on the firm-set ground--and this the clouds must claim.

"Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break,
To separate contemplation, the great whole:
And as the ocean many bays will make,
That ask the eye--so here condense the soul
To more immediate objects, and control

Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart
Its eloquent proportions, and unroll
In mighty graduations, part by part,
The glory, which at once upon thee did not dart.

"Not by its fault, but thine: our outward sense
Is but of gradual grasp--and as it is
That what we have of feeling most intense
Outstrips our faint expression; even so this
Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice
Fools our fond gaze, and, greatest of the great,
Defies at first our nature's littleness,
Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate."

Mendelssohn says, "You strive to distinguish the ceiling as little as
the canopy of heaven: you lose your way in St. Peter's; you take a walk
in it, and ramble till you are quite tired. When Divine Service is
performed and chanted there, you are not aware of it till you are quite
close.... When the music commences, the sounds do not reach you for a
long time, but echo and float in the vast space so that the most
singular and vague harmonies are borne toward you."

The interior space is the more increased by the fact of there being no
seats of any kind, and seems so immense that thin