After the Dean has gone into his stall on the right of the entrance, the service begins. The monotone of the prayers breaks into rich harmonies now and again at the responses--the organ re-echoes through the arches and pillars with thundering of the pedals, and wild, pathetic reed-notes. The splendid voices of the choir fill the building from end to end in the Psalms and canticles; or a boy's voice, singing a solo verse, floats up quivering and throbbing like a nightingale's song in a still wood at evening. And then--but I am speaking of "the days that are no more"--a small figure--unutterably dignified, with a pale, refined, determined face--in his white robes, his scarlet Doctor of Divinity's hood, and the crimson ribbon of the Order of the Bath with its golden jewel round his neck--followed the black-robed verger who carried a silver mace, up from the stalls, through the two walls of human beings, to the marble pulpit just outside the altar rails. And every face turned with eager expectation towards the bowed head, and hung breathless on the eloquent words that rang like a clarion through the great church; for it was Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, who was preaching.
But we are lingering in the choir, full, to us who know and love it, of such keen present interest. I must take you back into the Confessor's Chapel and the remote past.
We go through the iron gates that shut off the chapels from the choir, and climb the steps out of the ambulatory, for the Confessor's Chapel is raised several feet above the pavement of the Abbey. It lies, as I have said, directly behind the altar, only divided from it by the splendid screen which was erected early in the fifteenth century. This screen on the western side has been beautified and restored, and forms the reredos to the altar. But in the Chapel its eastern face is untouched; and, if you have patience to trace out the quaint carvings along the top, you will find they are a history of some of the miraculous and wonderful events of Edward the Confessor's life; the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus; St. John giving the ring to the Pilgrims; the quarrel between Tosti and Harold, Earl Godwin's sons, when the king predicted the calamities they would bring in after years upon England; and many more scenes of like nature.