The first view of the interior of this cathedral, seen even at the most favourable moment—­which is from about three till five o’clock—­is far from prepossing.  Indeed, after what I had seen at Rouen, Paris, Strasboug, Ulm, and Munich, it was a palpable disappointment.  In the first place, there seems to be no grand leading feature of simplicity:  add to which, darkness reigns every where.  You look up, and discern no roof—­not so much from its extreme height, as from the absolute want of windows.  Every thing not only looks dreary, but is dingy and black—­from the mere dirt and dust which seem to have covered the great pillars of the nave—­and especially the figures and ornament upon it—­for the last four centuries.  This is the more to be regretted, as the larger pillars are highly ornamented; having human figures, of the size of life, beneath sharply pointed canopies, running up the shafts.  The extreme length of the cathedral is 342 feet of Vienna measurement.  The extreme width, between the tower and its opposite extremity—­or the transepts—­is 222 feet.

There are comparatively few chapels; only four—­but many Bethstuecke or Prie-Dieus.  Of the former, the chapels of Savoy and St. Eloy are the chief:  but the large sacristy is more extensive than either.  On my first entrance, whilst attentively examining the choir, I noticed—­what was really a very provoking, but probably not a very uncommon sight,—­a maid servant deliberately using a long broom in sweeping the pavement of the high altar, at the moment when several very respectable people, of both sexes, were kneeling upon the steps, occupied in prayer.  But the devotion of the people is incessant—­all the day long,—­and in all parts of the cathedral.  The little altars, or Prie-Dieus, seem to be innumerable.  Yonder kneels an emaciated figure, before a yet more emaciated crucifix.  It is a female—­bending down, as it were, to the very grave.  She has hardly strength to hold together her clasped hands, or to raise her downcast eye.  Yet she prays—­earnestly, loudly, and from the heart.  Near her, kneels a group of her own sex:  young, active, and ardent—­as she once was; and even comely and beautiful ... as she might have been.  They evidently belong to the more respectable classes of society—­and are kneeling before a framed and glazed picture of the Virgin and Child, of which the lower part is absolutely smothered with flowers.  There is a natural, and as it were well-regulated, expression of piety among them, which bespeaks a genuineness of feeling and of devotion.

Meanwhile, service is going on in all parts of the cathedral.  They are singing here:  they are praying there:  and they are preaching in a third place.  But during the whole time, I never heard one single note of the organ.  I remember only the other Sunday morning—­walking out beneath one of the brightest blue skies that ever shone upon man—­and entering the cathedral about nine