the building.  Next day I came back, but there can be only one first time, and I could not again surprise myself with the same feeling of wonder and intoxication.  But St. Paul’s will bear many visits.  I came again and again, and never grew tired of it.  Crossing its threshold was entering another world, where the silence and solitude were so profound and overpowering that the noise of the streets outside, or of the stream of visitors, or of the workmen engaged on the statuary, made no impression.  They were all belittled, lost, like the humming of flies.  Even the afternoon services, the chanting, and the tremendous organ, were no interruption, and left me just as much alone as ever.  They only served to set off the silence, to fathom its depth.

The dome of St. Paul’s is the original of our dome at Washington; but externally I think ours is the more graceful, though the effect inside is tame and flat in comparison.  This is owing partly to its lesser size and height, and partly to our hard, transparent atmosphere, which lends no charm or illusion, but mainly to the stupid, unimaginative plan of it.  Our dome shuts down like an inverted iron pot; there is no vista, no outlook, no relation, and hence no proportion.  You open a door and are in a circular pen, and can look in only one direction,—­up.  If the iron pot were slashed through here and there, or if it rested on a row of tall columns or piers, and were shown to be a legitimate part of the building, it would not appear the exhausted receiver it does now.

The dome of St. Paul’s is the culmination of the whole interior of the building.  Rising over the central area, it seems to gather up the power and majesty of the nave, the aisles, the transepts, the choir, and give them expression and expansion in its lofty firmament.

Then those colossal piers, forty feet broad some of them, and nearly one hundred feet high,—­they easily eclipsed what I had recently seen in a mine, and which I at the time imagined shamed all the architecture of the world,—­where the mountain was upheld over a vast space by massive piers left by the miners, with a ceiling unrolled over your head, and apparently descending upon you, that looked like a petrified thunder-cloud.

The view from the upper gallery, or top of the dome, looking down inside, is most impressive.  The public are not admitted to this gallery, for fear, the keeper told me, it would become the scene of suicides; people unable to withstand the terrible fascination would leap into the yawning gulf.  But, with the privilege usually accorded to Americans, I stepped down into the narrow circle, and, leaning over the balustrade, coolly looked the horrible temptation in the face.