with sharp-sounding boot-heels up the dim nave and talking with sharp,
loud voices at the very steps of the altar where people were kneeling
at the most solemn moment of the mass. But even these invariably soften
their tones and their movements after a while.

This church has always some pleasant surprise for the frequent visitor.
The morning light shows one picture, the evening light another: the
sunrise adorns this window, the sunset that. There is no hour from dawn
to dark in which some gem of ancient painting does not look its best,
while little noticed, if seen at all, at other hours. Some are seen by
a reflected light; others, when the church is so dark that one may
stumble against a person in the nave, gather to themselves the dim and
scattered rays like an aureole, from which they look out with soft
distinctness; and there are others, again, upon which a sun-ray,
finding a narrow passage through arch after arch, alights with a sudden
momentary glory that is almost startling.

It is a fascinating place, that middle church--never light, but always
traversed by some varying illumination which is ever lost in shadows.
And in those shadows how much may lurk of present material beauty and
of beautiful memory! Here, before the chapel of St. Louis, Raphael
lingered, learning the frescoed Sibyls of its vault so by heart that he
almost reproduced them afterward in the Pace at Rome--that dear Raphael
who did not fear being called a plagiarist, his soul was so full of
beauty, and he so transfigured whatever he touched with that suave
pencil of his that seemed to have been clipped in light for a color.
And where did the feet of Michael Angelo rest when he stood in the
transept and praised that Crucifixion painted on the wall? One might
expect that the stones would have been conscious of the Orpheus they
supported.