Outside, a tender twilight mellowed the
atmosphere and gave brightness to approaching evening; inside, the
long shadows, gathering heavily in the aisles and richly sculptured
hollows of the side-chapels, brought night before its time. The last
votive candle at the Virgin's shrine flickered down and disappeared
like a firefly in dense blackness,--the last echo of the bell died
in a tremulous vibration up among the high-springing roof-arches,
and away into the solemn corners where the nameless dead reposed,--
the last impression of life and feeling vanished with the retreating
figure of the Cardinal--and the great Cathedral, the Sanctuary and
House of God, took upon itself the semblance of a funeral vault,--a
dark, Void, wherein but one red star, the lamp before the Altar,
burned.
II.
Lovely to a poet or an artist's eye is the unevenly-built and
picturesque square of Rouen in which the Cathedral stands,--lovely,
and suggestive of historical romance in all its remote corners, its
oddly-shaped houses, its by-ways and crooked little flights of steps
leading to nowhere, its gables and slanting roofs, and its utter
absence of all structural proportion. A shrine here, a broken statue
there,--a half-obliterated coat-of-arms over an old gateway,--a
rusty sconce fitted fast into the wall to support a lantern no
longer needed in these days of gas and electricity,--an ancient
fountain overgrown with weed, or a projecting vessel of stone for
holy water, in which small birds bathe and disport themselves after
a shower of rain,--those are but a few of the curious fragments of a
past time which make the old place interesting to the student, and
more than fascinating to the thinker and dreamer.
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