his age, who
first mounted the walls of redeemed Jerusalem, and was its first
Christian monarch, but who refused to accept a golden diadem on the spot
where the Saviour had been crowned with thorns; the Fleming who lived and
was the epic which the great Italian, centuries afterwards; translated
into immortal verse, is thus fitly associated with the beautiful
architectural poem which was to grace his ancestral realms. The body of
the church, the interior and graceful perspectives of which were not
liable to the reproach brought against many Netherland churches, of
assimilating themselves already to the municipal palaces which they were
to suggest--was completed in the fourteenth century. The beautiful
facade, with its tower, was not completed till the year 1518. The
exquisite and daring spire, the gigantic stem upon which the consummate
flower of this architectural creation was to be at last unfolded, was a
plant of a whole century's growth. Rising to a height of nearly five
hundred feet, over a church of as many feet in length, it worthily
represented the upward tendency of Gothic architecture. Externally and
internally the cathedral was a true expression of the Christian principle
of devotion. Amid its vast accumulation of imagery, its endless
ornaments, its multiplicity of episodes, its infinite variety of details,
the central, maternal principle was ever visible. Every thing pointed
upwards, from the spire in the clouds to the arch which enshrined the
smallest sculptured saint in the chapels below. It was a sanctuary, not
like pagan temples, to enclose a visible deity, but an edifice where
mortals might worship an unseen Being in the realms above.

The church, placed in the centre of the city, with the noisy streets of
the busiest metropolis in Europe eddying around its walls, was a sacred
island in the tumultuous main. Through the perpetual twilight, tall
columnar trunks in thick profusion grew from a floor chequered with
prismatic lights and sepulchral shadows. Each shaft of the petrified
forest rose to a preternatural height, their many branches intermingling
in the space above, to form an impenetrable canopy. Foliage, flowers and
fruit of colossal luxuriance, strange birds, beasts, griffins and
chimeras in endless multitudes, the rank vegetation and the fantastic
zoology of a fresher or fabulous world, seemed to decorate and to animate
the serried trunks and pendant branches, while the shattering symphonies
or dy