shortly
before her marriage; the death-bells are rung. The bridegroom
rushed wildly over the country. He hears a wail. It is she
herself wandering about the heath. "Seest thou not"--she
says--"who leads me?" But he catches her up and bears her
home. At this point the story threatened to become too
moving; but the hard inquisitor, Del Rio, cuts the thread.
"On lifting her veil," says he, "they found only a log of
wood covered with the skin of a corpse." The Judge le Loyer,
silly though he be, has restored the older version.

Thenceforth these gloomy taletellers come to an end. The
story is useless when our own age begins; for then the bride
has triumphed. Nature comes back from the grave, not by
stealth, but as mistress of the house.

CHAPTER II.

WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR.

"Be ye as newborn babes (_quasi modo geniti infantes_); be thoroughly
childlike in the innocence of your hearts; peaceful, forgetting all
disputes, calmly resting under the hand of Christ." Such is the kindly
counsel tendered by the Church to this stormy world on the morning
after the great fall. In other words: "Volcanoes, ruins, ashes, and
lava, become green. Ye parched plains, get covered with flowers."

One thing indeed gave promise of the peace that reneweth: the schools
were all shut up, the way of logic forsaken. A method infinitely
simple for the doing away with argument, offered all men a gentle
slope, down which they had nothing to do but go. If the creed was
doubtful, the life was all traced out in the pathway of the legend.
From first to last but the one word _Imitation_.

"Imitate, and all will go well. Rehearse and copy." But is this the
way to that true childhood which quickens the heart of man, which
leads back to its fresh and fruitful springs? In this world that is to
make us young and childlike, I see at first nothing but the tokens of
age; only cunning, slavishness, want of power. What kind of
literature is this, confronted with the glorious monuments of Greeks
and Jews? We have just the same literary fall as happened in India
from Brahminism to Buddhism; a twaddling flow of words after a noble
inspiration. Books copy from books, churches from churches, until they
cannot so much as copy. They pillage from each other: Aix-la-Chapelle
is adorned with the marbles torn from Ravenna. It is the same with all
the social life of those days. The bishop-king of