Surprising, most surprising, too, it was. As said before, the window was a circular one; the part of the tower where I stood was dusky-dark; its height above the congregation-floor could not have been less than ninety or a hundred feet; the whole interior temple was lit by naught but glass dimmed, yet glorified with all imaginable rich and russet hues; the approach to my strange look-out, through perfect solitude, and along rude and dusty ways, enhanced the theatric wonder of the populous spectacle of this sumptuous sanctuary. Book in hand, responses on my tongue, standing in the very posture of devotion, I could not rid my soul of the intrusive thought, that, through some necromancer’s glass, I looked down upon some sly enchanter’s show. At length the lessons being read, the chants chanted, the white-robed priest, a noble-looking man, with a form like the incomparable Talma’s, gave out from the reading-desk the hymn before the sermon, and then through a side-door vanished from the scene. In good time I saw the same Talma-like and noble-looking man reappear through the same side-door, his white apparel wholly changed for black. By the melodious tone and persuasive gesture of the speaker, and the all-approving attention of the throng, I knew the sermon must be eloquent and well adapted to an opulent auditory; but owing to the priest’s changed position from the reading-desk to the pulpit, I could not so distinctly hear him now as in the previous rites. The text, however, repeated at the outset, and often after quoted, I could not but plainly catch: ‘Ye are the salt of the earth.’ At length the benediction was pronounced over the mass of low-inclining foreheads; hushed silence, intense motionlessness followed for a moment, as if the congregation were one of buried, not of living men; when, suddenly, miraculously, like the general rising at the Resurrection, the whole host came to their feet, amid a simultaneous roll, like a great drum-beat, from the enrapturing, overpowering organ. Then, in three freshets--all gay, sprightly nods and becks--the gilded brooks poured down the gilded aisles.