By the end of the month he had cleared off long arrears of translation and romance-writing by finishing his Heimskringla and the romance of "The Water of the Wondrous Isles," and was working harder than ever for the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings. The main object of their defence at the moment was Peterborough Cathedral.
It was one of the churches which had been his earliest admirations ; he had known it in his boyhood, and felt towards it as though he had been one of its own builders. One of the most brilliant pieces of imaginative description in "The Earthly Paradise" is put in the mouth of a wanderer who had seen that magnificent western front rising. It occurs in the introductory verses to the tale of "The Proud King."
—I, who have seen
So many lands, and midst such marvels been,
Clearer than these abodes of outland men
Can see above the green and unburnt fen
The little houses of an English town,
Cross-timbered, thatched with fen-reeds coarse and brown,
And high o'er these, three gables, great and fair,
That slender rods of columns do upbear
Over the minster doors, and imagery
Of kings, and flowers no summer field doth see,
Wrought on those gables. Yea, I heard withal
In the fresh morning air, the trowels fall
Upon the stone, a thin noise far away;
For high up wrought the masons on that day,
Since to the monks that house seemed scarcely well
Till they had set a spire or pinnacle
Each side the great porch.... I am now grown old,
Yet is it still the tale I then heard told
Within the guest-house of that minster-close
Whose walls, like cliffs new-made, before us rose.
A long and bitter controversy was carried on between the Dean and Chapter on one side and the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings on the
