THE COMICALITIES OF THE CATHEDRAL. 135 



ascended from these seats ! On these venerable walls, for hun- 

 dreds of years, have the eyes of good men rested, as from their 

 firm and untottering consistency they gained new strength and 

 courage to fight the good fight, and again I raised my eyes to 

 catch communion with them. They fell upon a most infamous 

 countenance, like to the representations of Falstaff's a man with 

 one eye closed and his tongue tucked out the side of his mouth 

 his body tied up in a sack, his knees being brought upon each 

 side of his chin to make a snugger bundle. I turned away from 

 it immediately ; but there was another face in doleful grimace, as 

 if a man who had been buried alive had suddenly thrust his head 

 out of his coffin, and was greatly perplexed and dismayed at his 

 situation. Again I turned my eyes they fell upon the face of a 

 woman under the influence of an emetic ; again, upon a woman 

 with the grin of drunkenness. Everywhere that any thing like 

 a boss would be appropriate to the architecture, were faces sculp- 

 tured on the walls that would be capital in a comic almanac. 



I closed my eyes again, and tried to bring my mind to a rev- 

 erent mood, but the more I tried the more difficult I found it. 

 My imagination was taken possession of by the funny things, and 

 refused to search out the sublime. Not but that the sublime, the 

 grand, and the awful were not apparent also, all over and around 

 ay, and consciously within me ; but, like a stubborn child, my 

 mind would resist force. I gave it up, envying those who would 

 have been so naturally elevated by all these incitements and aids 

 to devotion. 



I could not understand a sentence of the service, but sat, and 

 rose, and kneeled ; thus only being able to join in the prayer, and 

 praise, and communion of the congregation. 



Soon my thoughts, now wandering freely, fell to moving in 

 those directions of reverie that I have found they are apt to take 

 when I am hearing what those who listen with critical ear shall 



