It
varies more than in the case of colour in the material itself
or of pigments, because it is a "living" colour, as Crabbe
rightly says in his lumbering verse:
The living stains, which Nature's hand alone,
Profuse of life, pours out upon the stone.
Greys, greens, yellows, and browns and rust-reds are but the
colours of a variety of lowly vegetable forms, mostly lichens
and the aerial alga called iolithus.
Without this colouring, its "living stains," Salisbury would
not have fascinated me as it did during this last visit. It
would have left me cold though all the architects and artists
had assured me that it was the most perfectly beautiful
building on earth.
I also found an increasing charm in the interior, and made the
discovery that I could go oftener and spend more hours in this
cathedral without a sense of fatigue or depression than in any
other one known to me, because it has less of that peculiar
character which we look for and almost invariably find in our
cathedrals. It has not the rich sombre majesty, the dim
religious light and heavy vault-like atmosphere of the other
great fanes. So airy and light is it that it is almost like
being out of doors. You do not experience that instantaneous
change, as of a curtain being drawn excluding the light and
air of day and of being shut in, which you have on entering
other religious houses.
