be fitted up for service, but religious enthusiasm declined by the end of the fifteenth century, and the unfinished building was left with a temporary roof.
Three centuries then rolled away, centuries of Reformation, of maritime discoveries and colonization, of European wars and the French Revolution, and in the wars of the Revolution, the French used the delapidated old edifice as a hay-magazine in 1796! But after Waterloo, the kings of Prussia began restoring and completing the hoary but unfinished edifice, and it was nine years after Sedan and the founding of the new German Empire, that the last stone of the huge southern tower was placed in position, and the completion of the Cathedral was celebrated in the presence of Emperor William I. in 1880.
I love to recall historical facts when I visit old edifices and structures and even hoary ruins. Nothing so interests me as the story of human progress,—the march of nations through ages of struggle to freedom and enlightenment. And the noblest edifices of Europe owe much of their interest to the grand historic past which seems to be sculptured on their walls.
For the rest, the Cologne Cathedral is in itself a most imposing structure. The towers are the loftiest church towers in Europe, being over five hundred feet high; and standing within the cathedral one is lost in admiration as he looks up to the lofty ceiling borne on 56 lofty pillars, and displaying a wealth of art which beggars description.
From Cologne I came to Wiesbaden, one of the
