‘This sprang, in the first instance, as a natural off-shoot from the coronations and interments of the kings.  Had they, like those of France, of Spain, of Austria, of Russia—been buried far away in some secluded spot, or had the English nation stood aloof from the English monarchy, it might have been otherwise.  The sepulchral chapels built by Henry the Third and Henry the Seventh might have stood alone in their glory.  No meaner dust need ever have mingled with the dust of Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Guelphs. . . .  But it has been the peculiar privilege of the kings of England that neither in life nor in death have they been parted from their people.  As the Council of the Nation and the Courts of Law have pressed into the Palace of Westminster, and engirdled the very throne itself, so the ashes of the great citizens of England have pressed into the sepulchre of the kings, and surrounded them as with a guard of honour after their death.  We are sometimes inclined bitterly to contrast the placid dignity of our recumbent kings, with Chatham gesticulating from the northern transept, or Pitt from the western door, or Shakspeare leaning on his column in Poet’s Corner, or Wolfe expiring by the chapel of St. John.  But, in fact, they are, in their different ways, keeping guard over the shrine of our monarchs and our laws; and their very incongruity and variety become symbols of that harmonious diversity in unity which pervades our whole commonwealth.’

Honoured by such a trust, we who serve God daily in the great Abbey are not unmindful of the duty which lies on us to preserve and to restore, to the best of our power, the general fabric; and to call on government and on private persons to preserve and restore those monuments, for which they, not we, are responsible.  A stranger will not often enter our Abbey without finding somewhere or other among its vast arcades, skilled workmen busy over mosaic, marble, bronze, or ‘storied window richly dight;’ and the very cloisters, which to Washington Irving’s eye were ‘discoloured with damp, crumbling with age, and crusted with a coat of hoary moss,’ are being repaired till that ‘rich tracery of the arches, and that leafy beauty of the roses which adorn the keystones’—of which he tells—shall be as sharp and bright as they were first, 500 years ago.

One sentiment, again, which was called up in the mind of your charming essayist, at the sight of Westminster Abbey, I have not felt myself: I mean its sadness.  ‘What,’ says he, ‘is this vast assembly of sepulchres but a treasury of humiliation? a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion.’

So does that ‘mournful magnificence’ of which he speaks, seem to have weighed on him, that he takes for the motto of his whole essay, that grand Elizabethan epigram—

 
When I behold, with deep astonishment,
To famous Westminster how there resort
Living in brasse or stony monument,
The Princes and the worthies of all sort;
Do I not see re-formed nobilitie,
Without contempt, or pride, or ostentation,
And look upon offenseless majestie,
Naked of pomp or earthly domination?
And how a play-game of a painted stone
Contents the quiet, now, and silent sprites,
Whom all the world, which late they stood upon,
Could not content, nor quench their appetites.
Life is a frost of cold felicities;
And death the thaw of all our vanities.
 

True, true—who knows it not, who has lived fifty years in such a world as this?—and yet but half the truth.

Were there no after-life, no juster home beyond the grave, where each good deed—so spake the most august of lips—shall in no wise lose its reward—is it nought, virûm volitare per ora, to live upon the lips of men, and find an immortality, even for a few centuries, in their hearts?  I know what answer healthy souls have made in every age to that question; and what they will make to the end, as long as the respect of their fellow-creatures is, as our Creator meant that it should be, precious to virtuous men.  And let none talk of ‘the play-game of a painted stone,’ of ‘the worthless honours of a bust.’  The worth of honour lies in that same worthlessness.  Fair money wage for fair work done, no wise man will despise.  But that is pay, not honour; the very preciousness whereof—like the old victor’s parsley crown in the Greek games—is that it had no value, gave no pleasure, save that which is imperishable, spiritual, and not to be represented by gold nor quintessential diamond.

Therefore, to me at least, the Abbey speaks, not of vanity and disappointment, but of content and peace.

 
The quiet now and silent sprites
 

of whom old Christolero sings, they are content; and well for them that they should be.  They have received their nation’s thanks, and ask no more, save to lie there in peace.  They have had justice done them; and more than one is there, who had scant justice done him while alive.  Even Castlereagh is there, in spite of Byron’s and of Shelley’s scorn.  It may be that they too have found out ere now, that there he ought to be.  The nation has been just to him who, in such wild times as the world had not seen for full three hundred years, did his duty according to his light, and died in doing it; and his sad noble face looks down on Englishmen as they go by, not with reproach, but rather with content.

Content, I say, and peace.  Peace from their toil, and peace with their fellow-men.  They are at least at rest.  Obdormierunt in pace.  They have fallen asleep in peace.  The galled shoulder is freed from the collar at last.  The brave old horse has done his stage and lain down in the inn.  There are no more mistakes now, no more sores, no more falls; and no more whip, thank God, laid on too often when it was least needed and most felt.

And there are no more quarrels, too.  Old personal feuds, old party bickerings, old differences of creed, and hatreds in the name of the God of love—all those are past, in that world of which the Abbey is to me a symbol and a sacrament.  Pitt and Fox, Warren Hastings and Macaulay, they can afford to be near to each other in the Abbey; for they understand each other now elsewhere; and the Romish Abbot’s bones do not stir in their grave beside the bones of the Protestant Divine whom he, it may be, would have burned alive on earth.

In the south aisle of Henry the VIIth’s Chapel lies in royal pomp she who so long was Britain’s bane—‘the daughter of debate, who discord still did sow’—poor Mary Queen of Scots.  But English and Scots alike have forgotten the streams of noble blood she cost their nations; and look sadly and pityingly upon her effigy—why not?

 
Nothing is left of her
Now but pure womanly.
 

And in the corresponding aisle upon the north, in a like tomb—which the voice of the English people demanded from the son of Mary Stuart—lies even a sadder figure still—poor Queen Elizabeth.  To her indeed, in her last days, Vanity of vanities—all was vanity.  Tyrone’s rebellion killed her.  ‘This fruit have I of all my labours which I have taken under the sun’—and with a whole book of Ecclesiastes written on her mighty heart, the old crowned lioness of England coiled herself up in her lair, refused food, and died, and took her place henceforth opposite to her ‘dear cousin’ whom she really tried to save from herself—who would have slain her if she could, and whom she had at last, in obedience to the voice of the people of England, to slay against her will.  They have made up that quarrel now.

Ay, and that tomb is the sacred symbol of a reconciliation even more pathetic and more strange.  Elizabeth lies—seemingly by her own desire—in the same vault as her own sister, Mary Tudor.  ‘Bloody Mary,’ now, no more.  James the First, who had no love for either of them, has placed at the head of the monument ‘two lines,’ as has been well said, ‘full of a far deeper feeling than we should naturally have ascribed to him’—

‘Fellows in the kingdom, and in the tomb, Here we sleep; Mary and Elizabeth the sisters; in hope of the resurrection.’

I make no comment on those words; or on that double sepulchre.  But did I not say well, that the great Abbey was a place of peace—a place to remind hardworked, purblind, and often, alas! embittered souls—

 
For Mother Earth she gathers all
Into her bosom, great and small.
Ah! could we look into her face,
We should not shrink from her embrace.
 

Yes, all old misunderstandings are cleared up by now in that just world wherein all live to God.  They live to God; and therefore the great Abbey is to me awful indeed, but never sad.  Awful it ought to be, for it is a symbol of both worlds, the seen and the unseen; and of the veil, as thin as cobweb, yet opaque as night, which parts the two.  Awful it is; and ought to be—like that with which it grew—the life of a great nation, growing slowly to manhood, as all great nations grow, through ignorance and waywardness, often through sin and sorrow; hewing onward a devious track through unknown wildernesses; and struggling, victorious, though with bleeding feet, athwart the tangled woods and thorny brakes of stern experience.

Awful it is; and should be.  And, therefore, I at least do not regret that its very form, outside, should want those heaven-pointing spires, that delicate lightness, that airy joyousness, of many a foreign cathedral—even of our own Salisbury and Lichfield.  You will see in its outer shape little, if any, of that type of architecture which was, as I believe, copied from scenery with which you, as Americans, must be even more familiar than were the mediæval architects who travelled through the German forests and across the Alps to Rome.  True, we have our noble high-pitched snow-roof.  Our architect, like the rest, had seen the mountain ranges jut black and bare above the snows of winter.  He had seen those snows slip down in sheets, rush down in torrents from the sun, off the steep slabs of rock which coped the hill-side; and he, like the rest, has copied in that roof, for use as well as beauty, the mountain rocks.

But he has not, as many another mediæval architect has done, decked his roofs as Nature has decked hers, with the spruce and fir-tree spires, which cling to the hill-side of the crag, old above young, pinnacle above pinnacle, whorl above whorl; and clothed with them the sides and summit of the stone mountain which he had raised, till, like a group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of the building should seem in act to grow toward heaven, and the grey leads of the Minster roof stand out amid peaks and turrets rich with carven foliage, as the grey rocks stand out of the primæval woods.

That part of the mediæval builder’s task was left unfinished, and indeed hardly attempted, by our Westminster architects, either under Henry III., Edward I., or Henry V.

Their Minster is grand enough by grave height and severe proportion; and he who enters stooping under that low-browed arch of the north door, beneath the beetling crag of weatherworn and crumbling stone, may feel like one who, in some old northern fairy tale, enters a cave in some lone mountain side where trolls and dragons guard the hoards of buried kings.

And awful it is, and should be still, inside; under that vaulted roof a hundred feet above, all more mysterious and more huge, and yet more soft, beneath the murky London air.

But sad I cannot call it.  Nor, I think, would you feel it sad, when you perceive how richly successive architects have squandered on it the treasures of their fancy; and made it, so they say, perhaps the most splendid specimen in the world of one of those stone forests, in which the men of old delighted to reproduce those leafy minsters which God, not man, has built; where they sent the columns aloft like the boles of giant trees, and wreathed their capitals, sometimes their very shafts, with vines and flowers; and decked with foliage and with fruit the bosses above and the corbels below; and sent up out of those corbels upright shafts along the walls, in likeness of the trees which sprang out of the rocks above their head; and raised those walls into great cliffs; and pierced those cliffs with the arches of the triforium, as with wild creatures’ caves or hermits’ cells; and represented in the horizontal string-courses and window-sills the strata of the rocks; and opened the windows into wide and lofty glades, broken, as in the forest, by the tracery of stems and boughs, through which were seen, not only the outer, but the upper world.  For they craved—as all true artists crave—for light and colour; and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, they might have been content with it, and left their glass transparent.  But in our dark dank northern clime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and grey mist, were all that they were like to see outside for six months in the year.  So they took such light and colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods, and set aloft in their stained glass windows the hues of the noonday and of the sunset, and the purple of the heather, and the gold of the gorse, and the azure of the bugloss, and the crimson of the poppy; and among them, in gorgeous robes, the angels and the saints of heaven, and the memories of heroic virtues and heroic sufferings, that they might lift up the eyes and hearts of men for ever out of the dark sad world of the cold north, with all its coarsenesses and its crimes, towards a realm of perpetual holiness, amid a perpetual summer of beauty and of light: as one who, from between the black jaws of a narrow glen, or from beneath the black shade of gigantic trees, catches a glimpse of far lands gay with gardens and cottages; and purple mountain ranges; and the far-off sea; and the hazy horizon melting into the hazy sky; and finds his soul led forth into an infinite, at once of freedom and repose.

Awful, and yet not sad; at least to one who is reminded by it, even in its darkest winter’s gloom, of the primæval tropic forest at its two most exquisite moments—its too brief twilight, and its too swift dawn.