It was past eight in the evening when Alwyn, after having spent a couple of days in bright little Brussels, arrived at Cologne. Most travelers know to their cost how noisy, narrow, and unattractive are the streets of this ancient Colonia Agrippina of the Romans,-- how persistent and wearying is the rattle of the vehicles over the rough, cobbly stones--how irritating to the nerves is the incessant shrieking whistle and clank of the Rhine steamboats as they glide in, or glide out, from the cheerless and dirty pier. But at night, when these unpleasant sounds have partially subsided, and the lights twinkle in the shop-windows, and the majestic mass of the Cathedral casts its broad shadow on the moonlit Dom-Platz, and a few soldiers, with clanking swords and glittering spurs, come marching out from some dark stone archway, and the green gleam of the river sparkles along in luminous ripples,--then it is that a something weird and mystical creeps over the town, and the glamour of ancient historical memories begins to cling about its irregular buildings,--one thinks of the legendary Three Kings, and believes in them, too,--of St. Ursula and her company of virgins; of Marie de Medicis dying alone in that tumbled-down house in the Stern-gasse,--of Rubens, who, it is said, here first saw the light of this world,--of an angry Satan flinging his Teufelstein from the Seven Mountains in an impotent attempt to destroy the Dom; and gradually, the indestructible romantic spell of the Rhine steals into the spirit of common things that were unlovely by day, and makes the old city beautiful under the sacred glory of the stars.
Alwyn dined at his hotel, and then, finding it still too early to retire to rest, strolled slowly across the Platz, looking up at the sublime God's Temple above him, the stately Cathedral, with its wondrously delicate carvings and flying buttresses, on which the moonlight glittered like little points of pale flame. He knew it of old; many and many a time had he taken train from Bonn, for the sole pleasure of spending an hour in gazing on that splendid "sermon in stone,"--one of the grandest testimonies in the world of man's instinctive desire to acknowledge and honor, by his noblest design and work, the unseen but felt majesty of the Creator. He had a great longing to enter it now, and ascended the steps with that intention; but, much to his vexation, the doors were shut. He walked from the side to the principal entrance; that superb western frontage which is so cruelly blocked in by a dwarfish street of the commonest shops and meanest houses,--and found that also closed against him. Disappointed and sorry, he went back again to the side of the colossal structure, and stood on the top of the steps, close to the central barred doors, studying the sculptured saints in the niches, and feeling a sudden, singular impression of extreme LONELINESS,--a sense of being shut out, as it were, from some high festival in which he would gladly have taken part.