Left alone, Agostino once more cast a glance on the strangely solemn
and impressive scene around him. He was standing on a platform of the
central tower which overlooked the whole building. The round, full moon
had now risen in the horizon, displacing by her solemn brightness
the glow of twilight; and her beams were reflected by the delicate
frost-work of the myriad pinnacles which rose in a bewildering maze
at his feet. It might seem to be some strange enchanted garden of
fairy-land, where a luxuriant and freakish growth of Nature had been
suddenly arrested and frozen into eternal stillness. Around in the
shadows at the foot of the Cathedral the lights of the great gay city
twinkled and danced and veered and fluttered like fire-flies in the
damp, dewy shadows of some moist meadow in summer. The sound of
clattering hoofs and rumbling wheels, of tinkling guitars and gay
roundelays, rose out of that obscure distance, seeming far off and
plaintive like the dream of a life that is past. The great church seemed
a vast world; the long aisles of statued pinnacles with their pure
floorings of white marble appeared as if they might be the corridors of
heaven; and it seemed as if the crowned and sceptred saints in their
white marriage-garments might come down and walk there, without ever a
spot of earth on their unsullied whiteness.
In a few moments Father Antonio had glided back to the side of the young
man, whom he found so lost in reverie that not till he laid his hand
upon his arm did he awaken from his meditations.
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