to my right, at the top of the street, where presently a short, vague
lane brought me into sight of the cathedral. I approached it obliquely,
from behind; it loomed up in the darkness above me enormous and sublime.
It stands on the top of the large but not lofty eminence over which
Bourges is scattered--a very good position as French cathedrals go, for
they are not all so nobly situated as Chartres and Laon. On the side on
which I approached it (the south) it is tolerably well exposed, though
the precinct is shabby; in front, it is rather too much shut in. These
defects, however, it makes up for on the north side and behind, where it
presents itself in the most admirable manner to the garden of the
Archeveche, which has been arranged as a public walk, with the usual
formal alleys of the _jardin francais_. I must add that I appreciated
these points only on the following day. As I stood there in the light of
the stars, many of which had an autumnal sharpness, while others were
shooting over the heavens, the huge, rugged vessel of the church
overhung me in very much the same way as the black hull of a ship at sea
would overhang a solitary swimmer. It seemed colossal, stupendous, a
dark leviathan.

The next morning, which was lovely, I lost no time in going back to it,
and found with satisfaction that the daylight did it no injury. The
cathedral of Bourges is indeed magnificently huge, and if it is a good
deal wanting in lightness and grace, it is perhaps only the more
imposing. I read in the excellent handbook of M. Joanne that it was
projected "_des_ 1172," but commenced only in the first years of the
thirteenth century. "The nave," the writer adds, "was finished _tant
bien que mal, faute de ressources_; the facade is of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries in its lower part, and of the fourteenth in its
upper." The allusion to the nave means the omission of the transepts.
The west front consists of two vast but imperfect towers; one of which
(the south) is immensely buttressed, so that its outline slopes forward
like that of a pyramid. This is the taller of the two. If they had
spires these towers would be prodigious; as it is, given the rest of the
church, they are wanting in elevation. There are five deeply recessed
portals, all in a row, each surmounted with a gable, the gable over the
central door being exceptionally high. Above the porches, which give the
measure of its width, the front rears itself,

piles