CARLYLE AND ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL. [To THE EDITOR OF THE
" SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—I think that with the danger threatening St. Paul's, many of your readers may be interested in the enclosed extract from a letter written in 1824 by Thomas Carlyle to his brother Alexander, and published by C. E. Norton in the "Early
"I was hurrying along Cheapside into Newg,ate Street among a thousand bustling figures and the innumerable jinglings and rollings and crashings of many-coloured Labour when all at once in passing from the abode of John Gilpin, stunned by the tumult of his restless compeers, I looked up from the boiling throng through a little opening at the corner of the street and there stood St. Paul's, with its columns and friezes, and its many wings of bleached yet unworn stone, with its statues and graves around it, with its solemn dome four hundred feet above me, and its gold ball and cross gleaming in the evening sun, piercing up into the heavens through the vapours of our earthly homes ! It was silent as Tadmor of the wilderness : gigantic, beautiful, enduring ; it seemed to frown with a rebuking pity on the vain scramble which it overlooked ; at its feet were tomb- stones, above it was the everlasting sky, within priests, perhaps, were chanting hymns ; it seemed to transmit with a stern voice the sounds of Death, Judgment, and Eternity through all the frivolous and fluctuating city. I saw it oft, and from various points, and never without new admiration."
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