l, that the great Abbey was a place of peace--a place to
remind hardworked, purblind, and often, alas! embittered souls--

For Mother Earth she gathers all
Into her bosom, great and small.
Ah! could we look into her face,
We should not shrink from her embrace.

Yes, all old misunderstandings are cleared up by now in that just world
wherein all live to God. They live to God; and therefore the great Abbey
is to me awful indeed, but never sad. Awful it ought to be, for it is a
symbol of both worlds, the seen and the unseen; and of the veil, as thin
as cobweb, yet opaque as night, which parts the two. Awful it is; and
ought to be--like that with which it grew--the life of a great nation,
growing slowly to manhood, as all great nations grow, through ignorance
and waywardness, often through sin and sorrow; hewing onward a devious
track through unknown wildernesses; and struggling, victorious, though
with bleeding feet, athwart the tangled woods and thorny brakes of stern
experience.

Awful it is; and should be. And, therefore, I at least do not regret
that its very form, outside, should want those heaven-pointing spires,
that delicate lightness, that airy joyousness, of many a foreign
cathedral--even of our own Salisbury and Lichfield. You will see in its
outer shape little, if any, of that type of architecture which was, as I
believe, copied from scenery with which you, as Americans, must be even
more familiar than were the mediaeval architects who travelled through
the German forests and across the Alps to Rome. True, we have our noble
high-pitched snow-roof. Our architect, like the rest, had seen the
mountain ranges jut black and bare above the snows of winter. He had
seen those snows slip down in sheets, rush down in torrents from the sun,
off the steep slabs of rock which coped the hill-side; and he, like the
rest, has copied in that roof, for use as well as beauty, the mountain
rocks.

But he has not, as many another mediaeval architect has done, decked his
roofs as Nature has decked hers, with the spruce and fir-tree spires,
which cling to the hill-side of the crag, old above young, pinnacle above
pinnacle, whorl above whorl; and clothed with them the sides and summit
of the stone mountain which he had raised, till, like a group of firs
upon an isolated rock, every point of the building should seem in act to
grow toward heaven, and the grey leads of the Minster roof stand out amid
peaks and