I do not think the English cathedrals are equal to those of Cologne, Rheims, Amiens, and Rouen; but they are full of interest, and they have varied excellences.  That of Salisbury is the only one which is of uniform style.  Its glory is in its spire, as that of Lincoln is in its west front, and that of Westminster is in its nave.  Gloucester is celebrated for its choir, and York for its tower.  In all are beautiful vistas of pillars and arches.  But they lack the inspiration of the Catholic Church.  They are indeed hoary monuments, petrified mysteries, a “passion of stone,” as Michelet speaks of the marble histories which will survive his rhapsodies.  They alike show the pilgrimage of humanity through gloomy centuries.  If their great wooden screens were removed, which separate the choir from the nave, the cathedrals doubtless would appear to more advantage, and especially if they were filled with altars and shrines and pictures, and lighted candles on the altars,—­filled also with crowds of worshippers, reverent before the gorgeously attired ministers of Divine Omnipotence, and excited by transporting chants, and the various appeals to sense and imagination.  The reason must be assisted by the imagination, before the mind can revel in the glories of Gothic architecture.  Imagination intensifies all our pleasures, even those of sense; and without imagination—­yea, a memory stored with the pious deeds of saints and martyrs in bygone ages—­a Gothic cathedral is as much a sealed book as Wordsworth is to Taine.  The Protestant tourist from Michigan or Pennsylvania can “do” any cathedral in two hours, and wonder why they make such a fuss about a church not half so large as the New York Central Railroad station.  The wonders of cathedrals must be studied, like the glories of a landscape, with an eye to the beautiful and the grand, cultured and practised by the contemplation of ideal excellence, when the mind summons the imagination to its aid, with all the poetry and all the history which have been learned in a life of leisure and study.  How different the emotions of a Ruskin or a Tennyson, in surveying those costly piles, from those of a man fresh from a distillery or from a warehouse of cotton fabrics, or even from those of many fashionable women, whose only aesthetic accomplishment is to play languidly and mechanically on an instrument, and whose only intellectual achievement is to have devoured a dozen silly novels in the course of a summer spent in alternate sleep and dalliance!  Nor does familiarity always give a zest to the pleasure which arises from the creations of art or the glories of nature.  The Roman beggar passes the Coliseum or St. Peter’s without notice or enjoyment, as a peasant sees unmoved the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland or the beautiful lakes of Killarney.  Said sorrowfully my guide up the Rhigi, “I wish I lived in Holland, for there are men there.”  Yet there are those whom the ascent of Rhigi and the ruined monuments of ancient Rome would haunt for a lifetime, in whose memory they would be perpetually fresh, never to pass away, any more than the looks and the vows of early love from the mind of a sentimental woman.