January 7, 2010

St Paul's Cathedral



St Paul’s is, as I remembered it, a very handsome noble architectural exploit, but singularly unaffecting. When I formerly came to it from the Italian cathedrals, I said, “Well, here is New York.” It seems the best of show-buildings, a fine British vaunt, but there is no moral interest attached to it.


~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [from his journals, April? 1848], in EMERSON IN HIS JOURNALS, selected and edited by Joel Porte, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) - London (England), 1982.

That’s just (si parva licet componere magnis) what I always thought about London’s cathedral…