bishops of the English time, with designations as familiar as those in
the directory: what a record! It moves you more than any of those
uniformed or cloaked images of warriors and statesmen, and it speaks
more eloquently of the infrangible continuity, the unbroken greatness of
England.

My last visit was paid after I had seen so many other English cathedrals
that I had begun to say, if not to think, that England was
overgothicized, and that I should be glad, or at least relieved, by
something classicistic. But I found that I was mistaken. That
architecture is alien to the English sky and alien to the English faith,
which continues the ancient tradition in terms not ceremonially very
distinct from those of Rome; and coming freshly from the minster in York
to the cathedral in London, I was aware of differences which were all in
favor of the elder fane. The minster now asserted its superior majesty,
and its mere magnitude, the sweep of its mighty nave, the bulk of its
clustered columns, the splendor of its vast and lofty windows, as they
held their own in my memory, dwarfed St. Paul's as much physically as
spiritually.

A great congregation lost itself in the broken spaces of the London
temple, dimmed rather than illumined by the electric blaze in the choir;
a monotonous chanting filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest
period of the church, and the sense of something pagan that had arisen
again in the Renaissance was, I perceived, the emotion that had long
lain in wait for me. St. Paul's, like St. Peter's, testifies of the
genius of a man, not the spirit of humanity awed before the divine.
Neither grew as the Gothic churches grew; both were ordered to be built
after the plans of the most skilful architects of their time and race,
and both are monuments to civilizations which had outlived mystery.