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Updated: June 18, 2025
The lectern, gay as a chanter undone by the treachery of wine, was skipping about like a peal of Chinese bells. Then I knew that the whole cathedral was whirling round so fast that everything appeared to be undisturbed. Then some graceful women's forms began to stir on the friezes. The cherubs who upheld the heavy columns shook out their wings.
The Titian is massive and wonderful: perhaps indeed too massive in the conception of the Madonna, for the suggestion of flight is lacking; but it has an earthiness, even a theatricalness, which one cannot forget, superb though that earthiness may be. The cherubs, however, commercial copies of which are always being made by diligent artists, are a joy.
It stood on a bracket, against the rudder casing, with fat cherubs' heads carved on the supports. The young girl crossed herself with a swift motion of the hand. The stern-ports, glazed in small panes, were black, and gleaming in a white frame-work. "Go go go with God," the girl whispered urgently. "There is a boat " I made a motion to rise; I wanted to go.
Earthly lovers, my daughter, by no means resemble those charming cherubs which you may have observed on the carved woodwork in our Cathedral. Otherwise you might have just a voice, flanked by seraphic wings.
And yet, by the common lamentation, one would suppose that all civilization is a slow suicide of the race, and that refinement and culture are to leave man at last in a condition like that of the little cherubs on old tomb-stones, all head and wings. It must be owned that the delusion has all the superstitions of history in its favor, and only the facts against it.
For the Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born to beauty; white or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon, and when they went into the church to mass, with their curling locks and their clasped hands, they stood under the grim statues like cherubs flown down off some fresco.
An oil altar-piece, in the choir of the same church, struck me less than the frescos. It represents Madonna and a crowd of saints under an orchard of apple-trees, with cherubs curiously flung about almost at random in the air. The motive of the orchard is prettily conceived and carried out with spirit.
Roving along the wall, his glance rested again upon the largest of the Virgin pictures a full-length figure in sweeping draperies, its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt adoration, its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth in bluish silver through festooned clouds of cherubs.
The most picturesque feature of the place is the old church, set amid tombs whose mossy and time-gnawed cherubs have exchanged grins for two hundred years and more. The old flint tower is grave and grim, but softened by a wonderful centuries old ivy in a veil of living green. A pathetic interest to artists hallows the venerable church-yard.
It is the doctrine of Mahound they splutter, and not any doctrine that we ever preached or even heard of: and they ought to say so fairly, instead of libeling us who were Apostles and gentlemen. But thus it is that the rascals make free with our names: and the cherubs keep track of these antics, and poke fun at us.
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