Then I seemed to suppose that the town itself had been
destroyed by fire, and effaced, as it may be thousands of years hence, and
that if I opened the door I should come out on a wilderness as flat and
sterile as the sea. Then the vision behind the veil of stone and slate
grew wilder with earthquakes. I seemed to see chasms cloven to the
foundations of all things, and letting up an infernal dawn. Huge things
happily hidden from us had climbed out of the abyss, and were striding
about taller than the clouds. And when the darkness crept from the
sapphires of Mary to the sanguine garments of St. John I fancied that some
hideous giant was walking round the church and looking in at each window
in turn.
Sometimes, again, I thought of that church with coloured windows as a ship
carrying many lanterns struggling in a high sea at night. Sometimes I
thought of it as a great coloured lantern itself, hung on an iron chain
out of heaven and tossed and swung to and fro by strong wings, the wings
of the princes of the air. But I never thought of it or the young men
inside it save as something precious and in peril, or of the things
outside but as something barbaric and enormous.
I know there are some who cannot sympathise with such sentiments of
limitation; I know there are some who would feel no touch of the heroic
tenderness if some day a young man, with red hair, large ears, and his
mother's lozenges in his pocket, were found dead in uniform in the passes
of the Vosges.
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