Of Luxemburg and the rest, going to
Rome, the centre of the world, had often to pass up this valley of the
Moselle, which (as I have said) is a road leading to Rome, and would
halt at fipinal and would at times give money for its church; with
this result, that the church belongs to every imaginable period and is
built anyhow, in twenty styles, but stands as a whole a most enduring
record of past forms and of what has pleased the changing mind when it
has attempted to worship in stone.
Thus the transept is simply an old square barn of rough stone, older,
I suppose, than Charlemagne and without any ornament. In its lower
courses I thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once two towers,
northern and southern; the southern is ruined and has a wooden roof,
the northern remains and is just a pinnacle or minaret too narrow for
bells.
Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century,
with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers. The ambulatory
is perfectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that Viollet le
Duc in France and Pugin in England have introduced to bring us back to
our origins and to remind us of the place whence all we Europeans
came.
