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 grey, and grisly
with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling
winds into yet unseemlier shape, and coloured 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 clangour of theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing, like the
cries of birds on a solitary coast between the cliffs and sea.
Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of all its
small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity.
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