Altars and Incense

Hilda had heretofore made many pilgrimages among the churches of Rome,
for the sake of wondering at their gorgeousness. Without a glimpse at
these palaces of worship, it is impossible to imagine the magnificence
of the religion that reared them. Many of them shine with burnished
gold. They glow with pictures. Their walls, columns, and arches seem a
quarry of precious stones, so beautiful and costly are the marbles
with which they are inlaid. Their pavements are often a mosaic, of rare
workmanship. Around their lofty cornices hover flights of sculptured
angels; and within the vault of the ceiling and the swelling interior
of the dome, there are frescos of such brilliancy, and wrought with so
artful a perspective, that the sky, peopled with sainted forms, appears
to be opened only a little way above the spectator. Then there are
chapels, opening from the side aisles and transepts, decorated by
princes for their own burial places, and as shrines for their especial
saints. In these, the splendor of the entire edifice is intensified
and gathered to a focus. Unless words were gems, that would flame with
many-colored light upon the page, and throw thence a tremulous glimmer
into the reader's eyes, it were wain to attempt a description of a
princely chapel.

Restless with her trouble, Hilda now entered upon another pilgrimage
among these altars and shrines. She climbed the hundred steps of the Ara
Coeli; she trod the broad, silent nave of St. John Lateran; she stood
in the Pantheon, under the round opening in the dome, through which
the blue sunny sky still gazes down, as it used to gaze when there were
Roman deities in the antique niches. She went into every church that
rose before her, but not now to wonder at its magnificence, when she
hardly noticed more than if it had been the pine-built interior of a New
England meeting-house.