PAGE 8
A Cathedral Courtship
by
5. Tomb of a bishop, where I tied Miss Schuyler’s shoe.
6. Tomb of another bishop, where I had to tie it again because I did it so badly the first time.
7. Sketch of the shoe; the shoe-lace worn out with much tying.
8. Sketch of the blessed verger who called her “madam,” when we were walking together.
9. Sketch of her blush when he did it the prettiest thing in the world.
10. Sketch of J. Q. Copley contemplating the ruins of his heart.
“How are the mighty fallen!”
SHE
LINCOLN, June 22
At Miss Brown’s, Castle Garden.
Mr. Copley has done something in the world; I was sure that he had. He has a little income of his own, but he is too proud and ambitious to be an idler. He looked so manly when he talked about it, standing up straight and strong in his knickerbockers. I like men in knickerbockers. Aunt Celia doesn’t. She says she doesn’t see how a well-brought-up Copley can go about with his legs in that condition. I would give worlds to know how aunt Celia ever unbent sufficiently to get engaged. But, as I was saying, Mr. Copley has accomplished something, young as he is. He has built three picturesque suburban churches suitable for weddings, and a state lunatic asylum.
Aunt Celia says we shall have no worthy architecture until every building is made an exquisitely sincere representation of its deepest purpose,–a symbol, as it were, of its indwelling meaning. I should think it would be very difficult to design a lunatic asylum on that basis, but I didn’t dare say so, as Mr. Copley seemed to think it all right. Their conversation is absolutely sublimated when they get to talking of architecture. I have just copied two quotations from Emerson, and am studying them every night for fifteen minutes before I go to sleep. I’m going to quote them some time offhand, just after morning service, when we are wandering about the cathedral grounds. The first is this: “The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportion and perspective of vegetable beauty.” Then when he has recovered from the shock of this, here is my second: “Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce.”
Memoranda: Lincoln choir is an example of Early English or First Pointed, which can generally be told from something else by bold projecting buttresses and dog-tooth moulding round the abacusses. (The plural is my own, and it does not look right.) Lincoln Castle was the scene of many prolonged sieges, and was once taken by Oliver Cromwell.
HE
YORK, June 24
The Black Swan.
Kitty Schuyler is the concentrated essence of feminine witchery. Intuition strong, logic weak, and the two qualities so balanced as to produce an indefinable charm; will-power large, but docility equal, if a man is clever enough to know how to manage her; knowledge of facts absolutely nil, but she is exquisitely intelligent in spite of it. She has a way of evading, escaping, eluding, and then gives you an intoxicating hint of sudden and complete surrender. She is divinely innocent, but roguishness saves her from insipidity. Her looks? She looks as you would imagine a person might look who possessed these graces; and she is worth looking at, though every time I do it I have a rush of love to the head. When you find a girl who combines all the qualities you have imagined in the ideal, and who has added a dozen or two on her own account, merely to distract you past all hope, why stand up and try to resist her charm? Down on your knees like a man, say I!