The sun had set when we reached Cologne. I gave my luggage to a porter, with orders to carry it to a hotel at Duez, a little town on the opposite side of the Rhine; and directed my steps toward the cathedral. Rather than ask my way, I wandered up and down the narrow streets, which night had all but obscured. At last I entered a gateway leading to a court, and came out on an open square--dark and deserted. A magnificent spectacle now presented itself. Before me, in the fantastic light of a twilight sky, rose, in the midst of a group of low houses, an enormous black mass, studded with pinnacles and belfries. A little farther was another, not quite so broad as the first, but higher; a kind of square fortress, flanked at its angles with four long detached towers, having on its summit something resembling a huge feather. On approaching, I discovered that it was the cathedral of Cologne. What appeared like a large feather was a crane, to which sheets of lead were appended, and which, from its workable appearance, indicated to passers-by that this unfinished temple may one day be completed; and that the dream of Engelbert de Berg, which was realized under Conrad de Hochsteden, may, in an age or two, be the greatest cathedral in the world. This incomplete Iliad sees Homers in futurity. The church was shut. I surveyed the steeples, and was startled at their dimensions. What I had taken for towers are the projections of the buttresses. Tho only the first story is completed, the building is already nearly as high as the towers of Notre Dame at Paris. Should the spire, according to the plan, be placed upon this monstrous trunk, Strasburg would be, comparatively speaking, small by its side.[B] It has always struck me that nothing resembles ruin more than an unfinished edifice. Briars, saxifrages, and pellitories--indeed, all weeds that root themselves in the crevices and at the base of old buildings--have besieged these venerable walls. Man only constructs what Nature in time destroys.