In the nave of York, looking eastward or westward, it is hard indeed to believe that we are in a church only a few feet lower than Westminster or Saint Ouens.  The height is utterly lost, partly through the enormous width, partly through the low and crushing shape of the vaulting-arch.  The vault, it must be remembered, is an imitation of an imitation, a modern copy of a wooden roof made to imitate stone.  This imitation of stone construction in wood runs through the greater part of the church; it comes out specially in the transepts, where a not very successful attempt is made to bring the gable windows within the vault—­the very opposite to the vast space lost in the roofs at Lincoln.  Yet with all this, many noble views may be got in York nave and transepts, provided only the beholder takes care never to look due east or west.  The western view is still further injured by the treatment of the west window—­in itself an admirable piece of tracery—­which fits into nothing, and seems cut through the wall at an arbitrary point.  But the nave elevation, taken bay by bay, is admirable.  Looking across out of the aisle—­the true way to judge—­the real height at last comes out, and we are reminded of some of the most stately minsters of France....

Durham [Footnote:  From “English Note Books.”  By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers of Hawthorne’s works, Houghton, Mifflin Co.  Copyright, 1870 and 1898.]

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Durham Cathedral has one advantage over the others I have seen, there being no organ-screen, nor any sort of partition between the choir and nave; so that we saw its entire length, nearly 500 feet, in one vista.  The pillars of the nave are immensely thick, but hardly of proportionate height, and they support the round Norman arch; nor is there, as far as I remember, a single pointed arch in the cathedral.  The effect is to give the edifice an air of heavy grandeur.  It seems to have been built before the best style of church architecture had established itself; so that it weighs upon the soul, instead of helping it to aspire.  First, there are these round arches, supported by gigantic columns; then, immediately above, another row of round arches, behind which is the usual gallery that runs, as it were, in the thickness of the wall, around the nave of the cathedral; then, above all, another row of round arches, enclosing the windows of the clerestory.

The great pillars are ornamented in various ways—­some with a great spiral groove running from bottom to top; others with two spirals, ascending in different directions, so as to cross over one another; some are fluted or channeled straight up and down; some are wrought with chevrons, like those on the sleeve of a police inspector.  There are zigzag cuttings and carvings, which I do not know how to name scientifically, round the arches of the doors and windows; but nothing that seems to have flowered out spontaneously, as natural incidents of a grand and beautiful design.  In the nave, between the columns of the side aisles, I saw one or two monuments....