Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/116

Rh and azure vault of the cathedral to which she brought him.

It was the Grotto Azzuro.

The sea lay calm as a lake beneath, the blue and misty light poured through the silence, the Gothic aisles of rock rose arch upon arch in awful beauty; there was no echo but of the melody of the waves chanting ever their own eternal hymn in a temple not built of men. It was beautiful, terrible, divine in its majesty, awful in its serenity, appalling yet godlike in its calm; while through the stillness swept the ebb and flow of the sea, and all the sunless shadow was steeped in that deep, ethereal, unearthlike, azure mist which has no likeness in all the wide width of the world. The boat rested there, alone; and high above the arched rocks rose, closing in on every side, like the roof of a twilight chancel, lost in vague and limitless immensity; while through the calm there echoed only one grand and mournful Kyrie Eleison—chanted by the choir of waves. Perfect stillness,—perfect peace,—filled only with that low and murmuring voice of many waters; a beauty not of land, not of sea, sublime and spiritual as that marvellous and azure light that seemed to still and change all hue, all pulse of life itself; a sepulchre and yet a