I reached Naumburg late at night in a tremendous storm; but the sun rose cheeringly, and I started early for the cathedral fearful of disappointment, as I had spent half the previous day in a mistaken attempt to find something interesting at Merseburg,--a place against which it is only right to warn all ecclesiologists. At Naumburg my fate was happier. The first view of the exterior is not very striking. A fair apsidal choir with a tower rising on either side, Romanesque at the base, and finished in late third-pointed, does not rise above the picturesque, and gives but small promise of the excessive interest of the interior. The plan is curious. A late Romanesque, or very early-pointed nave finished with eastern and western apsidal choirs, and separated from both of them by rood-screens; that to the eastern choir Romanesque, that to the western of most exquisite early pointed, and both of them coeval with the portions of the main fabric to which they belong. The eastern choir extends across the transepts, and is raised considerably above them, with solid stone parcloses, arcaded on the faces towards the transepts with semicircular arches, a kind of parclose not uncommon in the churches in this part of Germany.
Under the whole of the choir is a crypt entered from the transept, and in the angles between the transepts and the choir are towers, the lower stages of which are open to the transepts and form chapels, whose altars stand in small apsidal projections on the east face of the tower. A door on either side of the sanctuary leads by a staircase in the thickness of the wall to rooms above the chapels in the tower. The entrance to the choir is through the old rood-screen by doors on either side of the altar, and by doors in the parcloses, reached by long flights of steps in the transepts. The nave is divided into three groining bays, each bay subdivided and having two arches into the aisles. The western choir has one bay and a five-sided apse. On either side of it is a narrow passage leading to staircases which lead to rooms above some chapels, which have now to be mentioned. They form the base of towers at the west end of the aisles, but project considerably beyond them: only one of these towers has been built; the other is carried up and finished externally as though it was a transept, and produces at first some confusion when seen from the exterior. These tower chapels are very curious. That on the south side has a circular central shaft, decreasing in size to the capital, and the vaulting has four ribs springing from corbels in the angles of the chapel in a semicircular arch to the cap of the column, and there are no other ribs. In the _east_ wall is a small semicircular recess, in which still stands the original altar with a double footpace. The north tower chapel is almost exactly like the other, save that it has a polygonal central shaft, and the recess for the altar is rectangular. Both chapels are lighted with small round-headed windows in their western faces. From this description it will be seen that the ground-plan of this church is so curiously alike at its eastern and western ends, as to be somewhat confusing at first.