. There is a blue and hazy atmospheric distance, as painters call
it, up in the lantern of the cupola, a twelfth of a mile above the
pavement.

It is all very big. The longest ship that crosses the ocean could lie in
the nave between the door and the apse, and her masts from deck to truck
would scarcely top the canopy of the high altar, which looks so small
under the super-possible vastness of the immense dome. We unconsciously
measure dwellings made with hands by our bodily stature. But there is a
limit to that. No man standing for the first time upon the pavement of
Saint Peter's can make even a wide guess at the size of what he sees
unless he knows the dimensions of some one object.

Close to Filarete's central bronze door a round disk of porphyry is
sunk in the pavement. That is the spot where the emperors of the Holy
Roman Empire were crowned in the old church; Charlemagne, Frederick
Barbarossa and many others received the crown, the Chrism and the
blessing here, before Constantine's ancient basilica was torn down lest
it should fall of itself. For he did not build as Titus built--if,
indeed, the old church was built by him at all.

A man may well cast detail of history to the winds and let his mind
stand free to the tremendous traditions of the place, since so much of
them is truth beyond all question. Standing where Charles the Great was
crowned eleven hundred years ago, he stands not a hundred yards from the
grave where the Chief Apostle was first buried. There he has lain now
for fifteen hundred years, since the 'religion of the fathers' was
'disestablished,' as we should say, by Honorius, and since the Popes
became Pontifices Maximi of the new faith. This was the place of Nero's
circus long before the Colosseum was dreamed of, and the foundations of
Christendom's cathedral are laid in earth wet with blood of many
thousand martyrs. During two hundred and fifty years every bishop of
Rome died a martyr, to the number of thirty consecutive Popes. It is
really and truly holy ground, and it is meet that the air, once rent by
the death cries of Christ's innocent folk, should be enclosed in the
world's most sacred place, and be ever musical with holy song, and
sweet with incense. It needs fifty thousand persons to fill the nave
and transepts in Saint Peter's. It is known that at least that number
have been present in the church several times within modern memory; but
it is thought that the building would hold eighty