Well, he has altogether carried out his intention in half a hundred churches up and down Italy:  consider here in Florence S. Croce, S. Maria Novella, S. Spirito, and above all the Duomo.  Remember his aim was not the aim of the Gothic builder.  He did not wish to impress you with the awfulness of God, like the builder of Barcelona; or with the mystery of the Crucifixion, like the builders of Chartres:  he wished to provide for you in his practical Latin way a temple where you might pray, where the whole city might hear Mass or applaud a preacher.  He did this in his own noble and splendid fashion as well as it could be done.  He has never believed, save when driven mad by the barbarians, in the mysterious awfulness of our far-away God.  He prays as a man should pray, without self-consciousness and not without self-respect.  He is without sentiment; he believes in largeness, grandeur, splendour, and sincerity; and he has known the gods for three thousand years.

What, then, we are to look for in entering such a church as S. Maria del Fiore is, above all, a noble spaciousness and the beauty of just that.[88]

The splendour and nobility of S. Maria del Fiore from without are evident, it might seem, to even the most prejudiced observer; but within, I think, the beauty is perhaps less easily perceived.

One comes through the west doors out of the sunshine of the Piazza into an immense nave, and the light is that of an olive garden,—­yes, just that sparkling, golden, dancing shadow of a day of spring in an old olive grove not far from the sea.  In this delicate and fragile light the beauty and spaciousness of the church are softened and simplified.  You do not reason any longer, you accept it at once as a thing complete and perfect.  Complete and perfect—­yet surely spoiled a little by the gallery that dwarfs the arches and seems to introduce a useless detail into what till then must have been so simple.  One soon forgets so small a thing in the immensity and solemnity of the whole, that seems to come to one with the assurance of the sky or of the hills, really without an afterthought.  And indeed I find there much of the strange simplicity of natural things that move us we know not why:  the autumn fields of which Alberti speaks, the far hills at evening, the valleys that in an hour will make us both glad and sorry, as the sun shines or the clouds gather or the wind sings on the hills.  Not a church to think in as St. Peter’s is, but a place where one may pray, said Pius IX when he first saw S. Maria del Fiore:  and certainly it has that in common with the earth, that you may be glad in it as well as sorry.  It is not a museum of the arts; it is not a pantheon like Westminster Abbey or S. Croce; it is the beautiful house where God and man may meet and walk in the shadow.