Some cathedrals, like that of Wells, make you
think of gardens; but York Minster will not be satisfied with
less than an autumnal woodland, where the trees stand in clumps,
with grassy levels about them, and with spacious openings to the
sky, that let in the colored evening light.
You could not get lost in it, for it was so free of all such
architectural undergrowth as cumbers the perspectives of some
cathedrals; besides, the afternoon of our visit there were so
many other Americans that you could easily have asked your way in
your own dialect. We loitered over its lengths and breadths, and
wondered at its windows, which were like the gates of sunrise and
sunset for magnitude, and lingered in a sumptuous delay from
going into the choir, delighting in the gray twilight which
seemed to gather from the gray walls inward, when suddenly what
seemed a metallic curtain was dropped with a clash and the
simultaneous up-flashing of electric bulbs inside it, and we were
shut out from the sight but not the sound of the service that
began in the choir.
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