out, for now they have the dust of centuries upon them.

The screen or curtain between the nave and choir has eleven carved
figures, at full length, which appeared to represent kings, some of them
wearing crowns, and bearing sceptres or swords. They were in wood, and
wrought by some Gothic hand. These carvings, and the painted windows,
and the few monuments, are all the details that the mind can catch hold
of in the immensity of this cathedral; and I must say that it was a
dreary place on that cold, cloudy day. I doubt whether a cathedral is a
sort of edifice suited to the English climate. The first buildings of
the kind were probably erected by people who had bright and constant
sunshine, and who desired a shadowy awfulness--like that of a forest,
with its arched wood-paths--into which to retire in their religious
moments.

In America, on a hot summer's day, how delightful its cool and solemn
depths would be! The painted windows, too, were evidently contrived, in
the first instance, by persons who saw how effective they would prove
when a vivid sun shone through them. But in England, the interior of a
cathedral, nine days out of ten, is a vast sullenness, and as chill as
death and the tomb. At any rate, it was so to-day, and so thought one of
the old vergers, who kept walking as briskly as he could along the width
of the transepts. There were several of these old men when I first came
in, but they went off, all but this one, before I departed. None of them
said a word to me, nor I to them; and admission to the Minster seems to
be entirely free.

After emerging from this great gloom, I wandered to and fro about York,
and contrived to go astray within no very wide space. If its history be
authentic, it is an exceedingly old city, having been founded about a