, the sight of their airy
gambols and their various voices, from the deep human-like dove tone
to the perpetual subdued rippling, running-water sound of the aerial
martins, must always be a principal element in the beautiful effect.
Nor do I know a building where Nature has done more in enhancing the
loveliness of man's work with her added colouring. The way too in which
the colours are distributed is an example of Nature's most perfect
artistry; on the lower, heavier buttressed parts, where the darkest hues
should be, we find the browns and rust-reds of the minute aerial alga,
mixed with the greys of lichen, these darker stainings extending upwards
to a height of fifty or sixty feet, in places higher, then giving place
to more delicate hues, the pale tender greens and greenish greys, in
places tinged with yellow, the colours always appearing brightest on
the smooth surface between the windows and sculptured parts. The effect
depends a good deal on atmosphere and weather: on a day of flying clouds
and a blue sky, with a brilliant sunshine on the vast building after a
shower, the colouring is most beautiful. It varies more than in the
case of colour in the material itself or of pigments, because it is a
"living" colour, as Crabbe rightly says in his lumbering verse:

The living stains, which Nature's hand alone,
Profuse of life, pours out upon the stone.

Greys, greens, yellows, and browns and rust-reds are but the colours of
a variety of lowly vegetable forms, mostly lichens and the aerial alga
called iolithus.

Without this colouring, its "living stains," Salisbury would not have
fascinated me as it did during this last visit. It would have left me
cold though all the architects and artists had assured me that it was
the most perfectly beautiful building on earth.

I also found an increasing charm in the interior, and made the discovery
that I could go oftener and spend more hours in this cathedral without
a sense of fatigue or depression than in any other one known to me,
because it has less of that peculiar character which we look for and
almost invariably find in our cathedrals. It has not the rich sombre
majesty, the dim religious light and heavy vault-like atmosphere of the
other great fanes. So airy and light is it that it is almost like being
out of doors. You do not experience that instantaneous change, as of a
curtain being drawn excluding the light and air of day and of being
shut in, which you have