It gave one little slender squeak when the priest put
the water on its forehead, and then was quiet again.
We now went round to the facade of the cathedral. . . . . It is of black
and white marble, with, I believe, an intermixture of red and other
colors; but time has toned them down, so that white, black, and red do
not contrast so strongly with one another as they may have done five
hundred years ago. The architecture is generally of the pointed Gothic
style, but there are likewise carved arches over the doors and windows,
and a variety which does not produce the effect of confusion,--a
magnificent eccentricity, an exuberant imagination flowering out in
stone. On high, in the great peak of the front, and throwing its colored
radiance into the nave within, there is a round window of immense
circumference, the painted figures in which we can see dimly from the
outside. But what I wish to express, and never can, is the multitudinous
richness of the ornamentation of the front: the arches within arches,
sculptured inch by inch, of the deep doorways; the statues of saints,
some making a hermitage of a niche, others standing forth; the scores of
busts, that look like faces of ancient people gazing down out of the
cathedral; the projecting shapes of stone lions,--the thousand forms of
Gothic fancy, which seemed to soften the marble and express whatever it
liked, and allow it to harden again to last forever.
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