The Unknown Architect of the Minster.
A LEGEND, NOT OF COLOGNE.
In the days when Gothic architecture was still a vital force in the world, ever spontaneously renewing itself in varied forms, nourishing itself with all the life around it, enriching itself with all the changes of the times and seasons, and giving them forth in new and ever-varying forms of growth and beauty, as living things do, the Architect of the Minster lived.
Day by day, and night by night, the beautiful thought grew in his heart and brain. For, as with the Kingdom of God itself, so more or less with all the works of the Kingdom, is it not "as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how"?
All the beauty of all he saw and heard in the City and in the fields grew into it, the wonder and the joyousness of his childhood, the aspirations of his youth, the power of his manhood,—all the joys and sorrows of his life, its sacred memories, and its more sacred hopes.
When, he went through the streets of the City near at hand, the happy faces of little children, the patient toil of working-men and women, the furrows on the faces of the aged who could toil no more, all were sacred to him, and inspiring; for all said: "You are building a home for us, a home for each, where children's voices shall soar in praise, and the toil-worn find rest in the sacred shadow, and the aged a foretaste of the rest to which they are drawing near. A home for all, which, like the Great Home that abideth, shall unite, not separate."
When he wandered over the undulating reaches of solitary moorland near the city, or through the shades of forest and copse, or listened to the little rills trickling from their gravelly sources through the sedges of the marshy hollows, not a golden arrow of sunshine that shot through the trees, nor a curve of sedge or grass in the quiet places, but sowed some germ of beauty in his brain.
The sweep of the great River round meadow and tower, the rush of the current which linked it with the heart of the land, and the ebb and flow of the tides which bound it to the heart of the changing sea; the day, with its revelations of earth, and its awakening of eyes to see and work; the night, with its revelations of heaven, and its awakening of souls to see and pray; the steadfast arch of starry sky, which was no roof, but an unveiling of the Infinite; the changing gleams of cloud and sunshine, clothing the earth with her robe of light and tears; the intervening brief glows of dawn and sunset, when earth and sky held festival with blaze of colour and burst of choral song;—all these sank deep into his spirit, to live again in the pillars of his forest aisles, and the arch of the aspiring roof, which, like the starry roof of heaven itself, was not to shut the adoring heart in and down, but to lift it up and up for ever.