God forbid that I should attempt to describe it; and indeed I am not sure that the things that are most admired about it are the most admirable.  The west front of the Cathedral, for instance, has been temporarily ruined by the restoration of the little marble shafts, which now merely look like a quantity of india-rubber tubing, let in in pieces.  The choir of the Cathedral, again, is an outrage.  The low stone stalls, like a row of arbours designed by a child, the mean organ, the comfortable seats, have a shockingly Erastian air; there is not a touch of charm or mystery about it; I cannot imagine going there to pray.  The Vicars’ Close, which is foolishly extolled, has been made by restoration to look like a street in a small watering-place.

But, on the other hand, the Bishop’s Palace, with its moat full of swans, its fantastic oriels and turrets, its bastions and towers, wreathed with ivy and creepers, is a thing which fills the mind with a sort of hopeless longing to possess the secret of its beauty; one desires in a dumb and bewildered way to surrender oneself, with a yearning confidence, to whatever the power may be which can design and produce a thing of such unutterable loveliness.

By the favour of an ecclesiastical friend I was allowed to wander alone in a totally unaccountable paradise of gardens that lies to the east of the Cathedral.  It was impossible to conceive whom it belonged to, or what connection it had with the houses round about.  It was all intersected with pools and rivulets of clear water.  Here was a space of cultivated ground with homely vegetables.  Here stood a mysterious ancient building, which proved on examination to contain nothing but a gushing well of water.  Here was a lawn with a trim gravel walk bordered with roses; while a few paces away was a deserted thicket of sprawling shrubs, elders, and laurels, with a bit of wild rough meadow in the heart of the copse; and here was a sight that nearly brought me to my knees.  Beside an ancient wall, with the towers and gables of the Cathedral looking solemnly over, a great spring broke up out of the ground from some secret channel into a little pool surrounded by rich water plants, and flowed away in a full channel; not one, but three of these astonishing fountains were to be seen in this little space of grass and copse.

These are the Wells themselves, the Aquae Solis, as the Romans called them, fed by some hidden channel from the hills, sent gushing up day and night for the delight and refreshment of men.  I wish that the mediaeval builders had built the great church over instead of near these wells, and had let them burst up in a special chapel, so that the church might have been musical with the sound of streams; and so that the waters might have flowed from the door of the house, as Ezekiel saw them flow eastward from the threshold of the holy habitation to Engedi and Eneglaim to gladden the earth.

Then as I wandered in a place of dark leaves, beside the moat under the frowning towers, I saw a kingfisher sit on a bough, his back powdered with sapphires, his red breast, his wise head on one side, watching the stream.  In a moment he plunged and disappeared; in an instant he was back again on his perch, flashing, like Excalibur, over the stream, his prey in his bill.