circlet of light, when you look up into it from the cross-centre, you need not travel farther in search of cathedrals, for the waiting-room of any station is a better place for you;--but, if it amaze you and delight you at first, then, the more you know of it, the more it will amaze. For it is not possible for imagination and mathematics together, to do anything nobler or stronger than that procession of window, with material of glass and stone--nor anything which shall look loftier, with so temperate and prudent measure of actual loftiness. [Footnote 45: See, however, pages 32 and 130 (Sec.Sec. 36, 112-114) of the octavo edition of 'The Two Paths.'] 9. From the pavement to the keystone of its vault is but 132 French feet--about 150 English. Think only--you who have been in Switzerland,--the Staubbach falls _nine_ hundred! Nay, Dover cliff under the castle, just at the end of the Marine Parade, is twice as high; and the little cockneys parading to military polka on the asphalt below, think themselves about as tall as it, I suppose,--nay, what with their little lodgings and stodgings and podgings about it, they have managed to make it look no bigger than a moderate-sized limekiln. Yet it is twice the height of Amiens' apse!--and it takes good building, with only such bits of chalk as one can quarry beside Somme, to make your work stand half that height, for six hundred years. 10. It takes good building, I say, and you may even aver the best--that ever was, or is again likely for many a day to be, on the unquaking and fruitful earth, where one could calculate on a pillar's standing fast, once well set up; and where aisles of aspen, and orchards of apple, and clusters of vine, gave type of what might be most beautifully made sacred in the constancy of sculptured stone. From the unhewn block set on end in the Druid's Bethel, to _this_ Lord's House and blue-vitrailed gate of Heaven, you have the entire course and consummation of the Northern Religious Builder's passion and art. 11. But, note further--and earnestly,--this apse of Amiens is not only the best, but the very _first_ thing done _perfectly_ in its manner, by Northern Christendom. In pages 323 and 327 of the sixth volume of M. Viollet le Duc, you will find the exact history of the development of these traceries through which the eastern light shines on you as you stand, from the less perfect and tentative forms of Rheims: and so momentary was the culmination of the exact rightness, that here, from nave to transept--built only ten years later,--there is a little change, not towards decline, but to a not quite necessary precision. Where decline begins, one cannot, among the lovely fantasies that succeeded, exactly say--but exactly, and indisputably, we know that this apse of Amiens is the first virgin perfect work,--Parthenon also in that sense,--of Gothic Architecture.