en notice that
hugely lettered papal name. The building is so far beyond any familiar
proportions that at first sight all details are lost upon its broad
front. The mind and judgment are dazed and staggered. The earth should
not be able to bear such weight upon its crust without cracking and
bending like an overloaded table. On each side the colonnades run
curving out like giant arms, always open to receive the nations that go
up there to worship. The dome broods over all, like a giant's head
motionless in meditation. The vastness of the structure takes hold of a
man as he issues from the street by which he has come from Sant' Angelo.
In the open space, in the square and in the ellipse between the
colonnades and on the steps, two hundred thousand men could be drawn up
in rank and file, horse and foot and guns. Excepting it be on some
special occasion, there are rarely more than two or three hundred
persons in sight. The paved emptiness makes one draw a breath of
surprise, and human eyes seem too small to take in all the flatness
below, all the breadth before, and all the height above. Taken together,
the picture is too big for convenient sight. The impression itself moves
unwieldily in the cramped brain. A building almost five hundred feet
high produces a monstrous effect upon the mind. Set down in words, a
description of it conveys no clear conception; seen for the first time,
the impression produced by it cannot be put into language. It is
something like a shock to the intelligence, perhaps, and not altogether
a pleasant one. Carried beyond the limits of a mere mistake,
exaggeration becomes caricature; but when it is magnified beyond
humanity's common measures, it may acquire an element approaching to
terror. The awe-striking giants of mythology were but magnified men. The
first sight of Saint Peter's affects one as though, in the everyday
streets, walking among one's fellows, one should meet with a man forty
feet high.

Involuntarily we conceive that Saint Peter's has always stood where it
stands, and it becomes at once, in our imaginations, the witness of much
which it really never saw. Its calm seems meant to outlast history; one
thinks that, while the Republic built Rome, and Augustus adorned it, and
Nero burned it on the other side of the Tiber, the cathedral of the
world was here, looking on across the yellow water, conscious of its own
eternity, and solemnly indifferent to the ventures and adventures of
mankin