uncheerful, especially on the sunny side where the canons' children are
walking with their nurserymaids. And so, taking care not to tread on the
grass, we will go along the straight walk to the west front, and there
stand for a time, looking up at its deep-pointed porches and the dark
places between their pillars where there were statues once, and where
the fragments, here and there, of a stately figure are still left, which
has in it the likeness of a king, perhaps indeed a king on earth,
perhaps a saintly king long ago in heaven; and so higher and higher up
to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculpture and confused arcades,
shattered, and gray, and grisly with heads of dragons and mocking
fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into yet unseemlier shape,
and colored on their stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen,
melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the bleak towers, so far above
that the eye loses itself among the bosses of their traceries, though
they are rude and strong, and only sees like a drift of eddying black
points, now closing, now scattering, and now settling suddenly into
invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless
birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangor of theirs, so
harsh and yet so soothing, like the cries of birds on a solitary coast
between the cliffs and sea.

SECTION XI. Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of
all its small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its
secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense
and steady performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by the
cathedral clock; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on all who
have passed through the lonely square at their feet for centuries, and
on all who have seen them rising far away over the wooded plain, or
catching on their square masses the last rays of the sunset, when the
city at their feet was indicated only by the mist at the bend of the