ic
garden, with flowers and benches, and a pavilion for a band, and the
place was not empty, as such places in England never are. The result is
agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, involving the
destruction and dispersion of many interesting portions of the ruin. I
sat there for a long time, however, looking in the fading light at what
was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a great
many solid things have departed; it is a sort of satire on destruction
or decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time-bleached
expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, their strange mixture of
softness and grimness, have an indefinable fascination for the eye.
English ruins always come out peculiarly when the day begins to fade.
Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in the
twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral. I have seen many a
mouldering castle, but I remember no single mass of ruin more impressive
than this towering square of Rochester.

It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral
stands amid grass and trees, with a great garden sweep all round it, and
is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gate-house,
you appreciate immediately its grand feature--its extraordinary and
magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems more
beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. It is a long walk beneath
the walls from the gateway of the close to the far outer end of the last
chapel. Of all that there is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll I
can give no detailed account; I can speak only of the general
impression. This is altogether delightful. None of the rivals of
Canterbury have a more complicated and elaborate architecture, a more
perplexing intermixture of periods, a more charming jumble of Norman
arches and English points and perpendiculars. What makes the side-view
superb, moreover, is the double transepts, which produce a fine
modification of gables and buttresses. It is as if two great churches
had joined forces toward the middle--one giving its nave and the other
its choir, and each keeping its own great cross-aisles. Astride of the
roof, between them, sits a huge Gothic tower, which is one of the latest
portions of the building, though it looks like one of the earliest, so
crumbled and blunted and mellowed is it by time and weather. Like the
rest of the structure it has a magnificent color--