note rolls on the air; the casements whirr, the organ speaks.  That fills, as it were, to the brim, as with some sweet and fragrant potion, the cup of beauty; and the dreaming, inquiring spirit sinks content into the flowing, the aspiring tide, satisfied as with some heavenly answer to its sad questionings.  Then the stately pomp moves slowly to its place—­so familiar, perhaps trivial an act to those who perform it, so grave and beautiful a thing to those who see it.  The holy service proceeds with a sense of exquisite deliberation, leading one, as by a ladder, through the ancient ways, up to the message of to-day.  Through psalm and canticle and anthem the solemnity passes on; and perhaps some single slender voice, some boyish treble, unconscious of its beauty and pathos, thrown into relief, like a fountain springing among dark rocks, by the slow thunders of the organ, comes to assure the heart that it can rest, if but for a moment, upon a deep and inner peace, can be gently rocked, as it were, in a moving boat, between the sky and translucent sea.  Then falls the rich monotone of prayer; and the organ wakes again for one last message, pouring a flood of melody from its golden throats, and dying away by soft gradations into the melodious bourdon of its close.

Does this seem to you very unreal and fantastic?  I do not know; it is very real to me.  Sometimes, in dreary working hours, my spirit languishes under an almost physical thirst for such sweetness of sound and sight.  I cannot believe that it is other than a pure and holy pleasure, because in such hours the spirit soars into a region in which low and evil thoughts, ugly desires, and spiteful ambitions, die, like poisonous flowers in a clear and wholesome air.  I do not say that it inspires one with high and fierce resolution, that it fits one for battling with the troublesome world; but it is more like the green pastures and waters of comfort; it is pleasure in which there is no touch of sensual appetite or petty desire; it is a kind of heavenly peace in which the spirit floats in a passionate longing for what is beautiful and pure.  It is not that I would live my life in such reveries; even while the soft sound dies away, the calling of harsher voices makes itself heard in the mind.  But it refreshes, it calms, it pacifies; it tells the heart that there is a peace into which it is possible to enter, and where it may rest for a little and fold its weary wings.

Yet even as I write, as the gentle mood lapses and fades, I find myself beset with uneasy and bewildering thoughts about the whole.  What was the power that raised these great places as so essential and vital a part of life?  We have lost it now, whatever it was.  Churches like these were then an obvious necessity; kings and princes vied with each other in raising them, and no one questioned their utility.  They are now a mere luxury for ecclesiastically minded persons, built by slow accretion, and not by some huge