Agnes de Mansfeldt - 1836 Author:Thomas Colley Grattan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Within a couple of hours following the scene we have just described, the procession had trained its slow length through the principal streets, ha... more »lted at the several stations, and finally reached the cathedral, that sublime abortion of architectural magnificence, which beginning to crumble ere it could be completed, stands a rare monument of the too ambitious fate of genius; for the name of him who planned the mighty structure is now as unknown as those of the ignoble artisans who raised its hundred columns, the clustered shafts and flower wreathed capitals of which look like the petrified section of some giant forest. Many another moralmay be found by those who seek for such, in this vast emblem of sectarian power, stricken midway in its path of pride. And what lessons of taste does it not convey ? not merely to the votary of art who lauds its light-sprung arches, its groined ceilings, its chiselled pillars, or its massive walls, but to the worshipper of nature, who sees even in the corruption of decay such exquisite traces of beauty. There is not a ruin of the Rhine—and where do they abound so beautiful as on its banks?—that does not tell us, like this mightiest of them all, that time is the true master of the picturesque. He does not sweep in vulgar flight, the common-place devourer of man's triumphs. Even where he destroys he defaces not. Every mark of his tooth leaves a trait of loveliness, every feather of his wing a tint of grace. The solemn service of high mass, in which the several dignitaries before-named all bore a part, had now fitly concluded the ceremonies of the day ; the dense masses of spectatorswhich filled the cathedral gradually melted away into fractional groups; and appetite, which disperses a crowd quicker than the riot act, and at...« less