[Footnote 42: The philosophic reader is quite welcome to 'detect' and 'expose' as many carnal motives as he pleases, besides the good ones,--competition with neighbour Beauvais--comfort to sleepy heads--solace to fat sides, and the like. He will find at last that no quantity of competition or comfort-seeking will do anything the like of this carving now;--still less his own philosophy, whatever its species: and that it was indeed the little mustard seed of faith in the heart, with a very notable quantity of honesty besides in the habit and disposition, that made all the rest grow together for good.] 5. Whatever you wish to see, or are forced to leave unseen, at Amiens, if the overwhelming responsibilities of your existence, and the inevitable necessities of precipitate locomotion in their fulfilment, have left you so much as one quarter of an hour, not out of breath--for the contemplation of the capital of Picardy, give it wholly to the cathedral choir. Aisles and porches, lancet windows and roses, you can see elsewhere as well as here--but such carpenter's work, you cannot. It is late,--fully developed flamboyant just past the fifteenth century--and has some Flemish stolidity mixed with the playing French fire of it; but wood-carving was the Picard's joy from his youth up, and, so far as I know, there is nothing else so beautiful cut out of the goodly trees of the world. Sweet and young-grained wood it is: oak, _trained_ and chosen for such work, sound now as four hundred years since. Under the carver's hand it seems to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living flame. Canopy crowning canopy, pinnacle piercing pinnacle--it shoots and wreathes itself into an enchanted glade, inextricable, imperishable, fuller of leafage than any forest, and fuller of story than any book.[43]