But the wrath of the Arch-Enemy, as may well be believed, waxed greater as this prodigious structure gradually developed itself in all its lordliness and strength, and was not at all appeased at its triumphant completion.  Ever since then he has visited its stately height with especial marks of his malice.  The most furious tempests have raged about it, and more than sixty times has it been struck by lightning, and five times have earthquakes shaken its foundations.  But in vain.  “The Golden Legend” tells us how Lucifer and the Powers of the Air stormed about the spire, and how he cried,—­

  “Hasten! hasten! 
  O ye spirits! 
  From its station drag the ponderous
  Cross of iron that to mock us
  Is uplifted high in air!”

and how the voices replied,—­

  “Oh, we cannot! 
  For around it
  All the Saints and Guardian Angels
  Throng in legions to protect it;
  They defeat us everywhere!”

At one point, however, the evil spirits were successful; the colossal statue of the Virgin, which crowned the dizzy summit, and was familiar with the secrets of the upper air, and which, like its dread Enemy,

  “above the rest,
  In shape and gesture proudly eminent,
  Stood like a tower,”—­

after having for fifty years borne the insults of these airy powers, till it had lost all its original brightness, and its face

  “Deep scars of thunder had intrenched,”—­

was taken down, and the present cross put in its place.  And there it stands to this day, high up in the silence of midair, where the voices of the city below are rendered small and thin by the distance,—­four hundred and seventy-four feet above the heads of the populace, who, in their littleness, crawl about and traffic at its base.  This amazing summit, “moulded in colossal calm,” in its unapproachable grandeur, seems to forget the city from which it rises, and to hold communion only with that vast circle of “crowded farms and lessening towers” which it surveys.  It is a worthy companionship; on the one hand, the great Vosgian chain, the closed gates of France,—­on the other, afar off, the hills of the Black Forest, and, more near, Father Rhine, winding his silver thread among the villages and vineyards of Germany.

There is (or was) an enormous key suspended just beneath the cross of Strasburg Cathedral, its use, and why it was placed there, having passed away from the memory of man.  If it were not to open the gates of heaven for those who built this ladder of light and those who worship in its shadow, it remains a riddle and a blank.  Let us accept the interpretation, and, made mild-eyed by the lens of tender memories, we shall behold in every spire a means of grace and a hope of glory.

THE PROFESSOR’S STORY.

PRELIMINARY CORRESPONDENCE.

THE PUBLISHERS TO THE AUTHOR.