which we are
sitting are single, but they are double round the choir--"

But Durtal was not listening; far away from this architectural exegesis,
he was admiring the amazing structure without even trying to analyze it.

Wrapped in the mystery of its own shadow thick with the haze of rain, it
soared up lighter and lighter as it rose in the skyey whiteness of its
arcades, aspiring like a soul purifying itself with increasing light as
it toils up the ways of the mystic life.

The clustered columns sprang in slender sheaves, their groups so light
that they looked as if they might bend at a breath; yet it was not till
they had reached a giddy height that these stems curved over, flying
from one side of the Cathedral to the other to meet above the void,
mingling their sap and blossoming at last, like a basket of flowers, in
the once gilt pendants from the roof.

This church appeared as a supreme effort of matter striving for
lightness, rejecting, as though it were a burden, the diminished weight
of its walls and substituting a less ponderous and more lucent matter,
replacing the opacity of stone by the diaphanous texture of glass.

It grew more spiritual--wholly spiritual, purely prayer, as it sprang
towards the Lord to meet Him; light and slender, as it were
imponderable, it remained the most glorious expression of Beauty
escaping from its earthly dross, Beauty become seraphic.

It was as slender and colourless as Roger Van der Weyden's Virgins, who
are so fragile, so ethereal, that they might blow away were they not
held down to earth by the weight of their brocades and trains. Here was
the same mystical conception of a long-drawn body and an ardent soul,
which, unable to free itself completely from that body, strove to purify
it by reducing it, refining it, almost distilling it to a fluid.

The building bewildered him with the giddy flight of its vault, the
dazzling splendour of its windows. The weather was gloomy, and yet a
furnace of gems flamed in the lancets of the windows and the blazing
wheels of the roses.

Up there, high in air, as they might be salamanders, human beings with
faces ablaze and robes on fire dwelt in a firmament of glory; but these
conflagrations were enclosed and limited by an incombustible frame of
darker glass which set off the youthful and radiant joy of the flames by
the contrast of melancholy, the suggestion of the more serious and aged
aspect presented by gloomy colouring. The bugle c