Two other churches near this afforded little worth notice. One of them was Protestant, and as a consequence, was elaborately pewed and galleried; it was seven or eight bays in length, and groined throughout, and entered by a good double door. The other was very similar, and had a curious kind of narthex under the western tower.
The Ludgeri-Kirche is of more interest, having a fine octagonal belfry of late date; this was undergoing repair, as was also the church, whose nave is of simple Romanesque with a good middle-pointed apse. There is another church of small size with an eastern apse, and a very low gabled tower at the north-west angle. This is near the railway station.
For two things besides her domestic buildings Münster is certainly to be remembered: these are the brass work and the sculpture; the latter is generally remarkably good, and I think I have seldom seen more spirited figures than I saw there.
In a silversmith’s shop, opposite the Lamberti-Kirche, I found a magnificent old monstrance, of the fourteenth century, and of very elaborate detail; it belonged to a church some miles distant, the name of which I have forgotten; this man was making church plate in very fair fashion, copying old examples with some care and with a good deal of feeling and enthusiasm; I need hardly say that such men are as rare on the Continent as they are here.
From Münster I returned to Hamm, and thence by another branch railway to Soest, travelling through a country without any feature by which to remember it save its interminable rows of poplars.
The first view of Soest from the railway is striking; several steeples, of which that of the cathedral is the grandest, stand up well behind a bank of trees, and a great extent of picturesque and half-ruined old town walls.
The town itself is very curious, much more like some large Swiss village, such as one remembers in the Upper Valais or the Hasli-Thal, than any other cathedral town that I know in northern Europe. The streets are all absurdly irregular, bending and twisting about in every possible direction, and full of half-timbered houses, which are all corbelled forward and seem generally to be very ancient. I think, indeed, that I have never seen more picturesque grouping of old buildings, but it is difficult to imagine how they can have preserved their old character so intact; there is absolutely, I believe, not one shop with a shop front or display of its wares of any kind, and hardly more than one modernized house, and this is a smart little inn with a nice garden, and a large Speise-Saal whose walls were literally covered with English prints, many of them old and very good. The population of the place consists nevertheless of some seven or eight thousand persons.