its beauty and pathos, thrown
into relief, like a fountain springing among dark rocks, by the slow
thunders of the organ, comes to assure the heart that it can rest, if
but for a moment, upon a deep and inner peace, can be gently rocked, as
it were, in a moving boat, between the sky and translucent sea. Then
falls the rich monotone of prayer; and the organ wakes again for one
last message, pouring a flood of melody from its golden throats, and
dying away by soft gradations into the melodious bourdon of its close.

Does this seem to you very unreal and fantastic? I do not know; it is
very real to me. Sometimes, in dreary working hours, my spirit
languishes under an almost physical thirst for such sweetness of sound
and sight. I cannot believe that it is other than a pure and holy
pleasure, because in such hours the spirit soars into a region in which
low and evil thoughts, ugly desires, and spiteful ambitions, die, like
poisonous flowers in a clear and wholesome air. I do not say that it
inspires one with high and fierce resolution, that it fits one for
battling with the troublesome world; but it is more like the green
pastures and waters of comfort; it is pleasure in which there is no
touch of sensual appetite or petty desire; it is a kind of heavenly
peace in which the spirit floats in a passionate longing for what is
beautiful and pure. It is not that I would live my life in such
reveries; even while the soft sound dies away, the calling of harsher
voices makes itself heard in the mind. But it refreshes, it calms, it
pacifies; it tells the heart that there is a peace into which it is
possible to enter, and where it may rest for a little and fold its
weary wings.

Yet even as I write, as the gentle mood lapses and fades, I find myself
beset with uneasy and bewildering thoughts about the whole. What was
the power that raised these great places as so essential and vital a
part of life? We have lost it now, whatever it was. Churches like these
were then an obvious necessity; kings and princes vied with each other
in raising them, and no one questioned their utility. They are now a
mere luxury for ecclesiastically minded persons, built by slow
accretion, and not by some huge single gift, to please the pride of a
county or a city; and this in days when England is a thousandfold
richer than she was. They are no longer a part of the essence of life;
life has flowed away from their portals, and left them a beautiful
shadow,