I was glad to lose my way about the town, for if I kept
walking I was sure, sooner or later, to bring up at the Minster;
but the last evening of our stay I made a purposed pilgrimage to
it for a final emotion. It was the clearest evening we had in
York, and at half-past six the sun was setting in a transparent
sky, which somehow it did not flush with any of those glaring
reds which the vulgarer sorts of sunsets are fond of, but bathed
the air in a delicate suffusion of daffodil light, just tinged
with violet. This was the best medium to see the past of the
Minster in, and I can see it there now, if I did not then. I
followed, or I follow, its veracious history back to the
beginning of the seventh century, whence you can look back
further still to the earliest Christian temples where the Romans
worshipped with the Britons, whom they had enslaved and
converted. But it was not till 627 that the little wooden chapel
was built on the site of the Minster, to house the rite of the
Northumbrian King Eadwine's baptism. He felt so happy in his new
faith that he replaced the wooden structure with stone.
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