Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 4.djvu/448

416 morning; and, as the affair had not been kept quite secret, I did not escape the jokes of my friends, who might have foretold me, from their own experience, how troublesome the friendship of the captain could become upon occasion.

But now, while I am thinking what should be imparted next, there comes again into my thoughts, by a strange play of memory, that reverend minster-building, to which in those days I devoted particular attention, and which, in general, constantly presents itself to the eye, both in the city and in the country.

The more I considered the façade, the more was that first impression strengthened and developed, that here the sublime has entered into alliance with the pleasing. If the vast, when it appears as a mass before us, is not to terrify; if it is not to confuse, when we seek to investigate its details,—it must enter into an unnatural, apparently impossible, connection, it must associate to itself the pleasing. But now, since it will be impossible for us to speak of the impression of the minster except by considering both these incompatible qualities as united, so do we already see, from this, in what high value we must hold this ancient monument; and we begin in earnest to describe how such contradictory elements could peaceably interpenetrate and unite themselves.

First of all, without thinking of the towers, we devote our considerations to the façade alone, which powerfully strikes the eye as an upright, oblong parallelogram. If we approach it at twilight, in the moonshine, on a starlight night, when the parts appear more or less indistinct and at last disappear, we see only a colossal wall, the height of which bears an advantageous proportion to the breadth. If we view it by day, and by the power of the mind abstract from the details, we recognise the front of a building which not only encloses the space within, but also covers