THE CATHEDRAL OF LAON[58] And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.--Apoc. xxi:2, used in the office for the dedication of a church. While Sens, Noyon, and Senlis were building, the splendid cathedral of Laon was begun, about 1160. The usual transition features of Primary Gothic showed in its retention of tribunes over the side aisles, in the simultaneous use of round and pointed arches, the beringed colonnettes, and the salient transept arms. The chapel, in two stories, that opened on each arm of the transept, was another Romanesque tradition. The interior of Laon, "the cathedral of Purity, Silence, and Power," is indeed most impressive. One bay follows another with a regularity that is accentuated by the interior elevation being in four stories--pier arcade, tribune arches, triforium wall arcade, and clearstory. It is not a lofty church, but, like English cathedrals, what it lacks in height is compensated for in length. There are eleven bays in the nave, and ten in the choir. Moreover, because it was comparatively low it could build a square transept-crossing tower, and the average French cathedral was too high for such a tower to be artistic. Laon and Braine were exceptions among Ile-de-France churches in having central lanterns; they were derived from Normandy, since the Rhenish lantern usually was octagonal. Strange as it may seem to say of the most prominent, most open, and best-lighted part of a church, there is a blessed seclusion beneath the wide white tower of Laon that "shuts the heart up in tranquillity." Down the long church, the stout monolithic piers make two virile lines. Only during a short period were such sturdy cylinders used, here and in Notre Dame at Paris are the chief examples, and both cathedrals were artistically right in preferring their uniform columns, even though both of them used the sexpartite vaulting that called for alternating ground supports. The coming cathedrals were to adopt once for all the barlong system of vaulting, where the concentration of loads fell equally on every bay, and to evolve a classic type of pier, consisting of a central cylinder flanked by four semi-attached columns. At Laon a few piers in the nave experimented with free-standing colonnettes, three of which were placed in front of the pillar to enlarge, there, the abacus of the capital on which stood the shafts that mounted to the vault-springing. The elliptical piers of Beauvais, longer from north to south, were to be the most perfect solution of the problem of ground supports.