I'll
awa' to the kirk, an' see what it's like. Will I gie ye a buik
afore I gang?'
'No, thank you. I'll just lie quiet till you come back--if I can.'
Robert instructed Shargar to watch for the slightest sound from the
sick-room, and went to church.
As he approached the granite cathedral, the only one in the world, I
presume, its stern solidity, so like the country and its men, laid
hold of his imagination for the first time. No doubt the necessity
imposed by the unyielding material had its share, and that a large
one, in the character of the building: whence else that simplest of
west windows, seven lofty, narrow slits of light, parted by granite
shafts of equal width, filling the space between the corner
buttresses of the nave, and reaching from door to roof? whence else
the absence of tracery in the windows--except the severely gracious
curves into which the mullions divide?--But this cause could not
have determined those towers, so strong that they might have borne
their granite weight soaring aloft, yet content with the depth of
their foundation, and aspiring not. The whole aspect of the
building is an outcome, an absolute blossom of the northern nature.
There is but the nave of the church remaining. About 1680, more
than a century after the Reformation, the great tower fell,
destroying the choir, chancel, and transept, which have never been
rebuilt. May the reviving faith of the nation in its own history,
and God at the heart of it, lead to the restoration of this grand
old monument of the belief of their fathers.
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