Of course I went to see the Cathedral that Ruskin has claimed to be the most perfect building in the world; indeed, each Saturday found me there; for like all true beauty the edifice does not attract merely by novelty but satisfies the far truer test of familiarity. Yet I confess to a thrill on first entering that dream in stone, which could not come a second time. For down in the mud I had forgotten, in the obsession of the present, man’s dreams and aspirations for the future. Now, here again I was in touch with eternal things that wars do not affect. I remember once at Malvern we had been groping and choking in a thick fog all day; then someone suggested a walk, and three of us ventured out and climbed the Beacon. Half-way up the fog began to thin, and soon we emerged into a clear sunshine. Below lay all the plain wrapped in a great level blanket of white fog; here and there the top of a tall tree or a small hill protruded its head out of the mist and seemed to be laughing at its poor hidden companions; and in a cloudless blue the sun was smiling at mankind below who had forgotten his very existence. So in Amiens Cathedral I used to get my head out of the thick fog of war for a time, and in that stately silence recover my vision of the sun. The cathedral is a building full of all the freshness of spring. I was at vespers there on Christmas afternoon, and was then impressed by the wonderful lightness of the building: so often there is gloom in a cathedral, that gives a heavy feeling. But Amiens Cathedral is perfectly lighted, and in the east window glows a blue that reminded me of viper’s bugloss in a Swiss meadow. My imagination flew back to the building of the cathedral, and to the brain that conceived it, and beyond that again to the tradition that through long years moulded the conception; and behind all to the idea, the ultimate birth of this perfect creation. And one seemed to be straining almost beyond humanity, to see the first spring flowers looking up in wonder at the sky. The stately pillars were man’s aspiration towards his Creator, the floating music his attempt at praise.