n, to those
skilful hands at work day by day with the chisel, the pencil, or the
needle, in many an enduring form of exquisite fancy. In three
successive phases or fashions might be traced, especially in the carved
work, the humours he had determined. There was first wild gaiety,
exuberant in a wreathing of life-like imageries, from which nothing
really present in nature was excluded. That, as the soul of Denys
darkened, had passed into obscure regions of the satiric, the grotesque
and coarse. But from this time there was manifest, with no loss of
power or effect, a well-assured seriousness, somewhat [71] jealous and
exclusive, not so much in the selection of the material on which the
arts were to work, as in the precise sort of expression that should be
induced upon it. It was as if the gay old pagan world had been blessed
in some way; with effects to be seen most clearly in the rich miniature
work of the manuscripts of the capitular library,--a marvellous Ovid
especially, upon the pages of which those old loves and sorrows seemed
to come to life again in medieval costume, as Denys, in cowl now and
with tonsured head, leaned over the painter, and led his work, by a
kind of visible sympathy, often unspoken, rather than by any formal
comment.

Above all, there was a desire abroad to attain the instruments of a
freer and more various sacred music than had been in use hitherto--a
music that might express the whole compass of souls now grown to
manhood. Auxerre, indeed, then as afterwards, was famous for its
liturgical music. It was Denys, at last, to whom the thought occurred
of combining in a fuller tide of music all the instruments then in use.
Like the Wine-god of old, he had been a lover and patron especially of
the music of the pipe, in all its varieties. Here, too, there had been
evident those three fashions or "modes":--first, the simple and
pastoral, the homely note of the pipe, like the piping of the wind
itself from off the distant fields; then, the wild, savage din, that
had cost so much to quiet people, and [72] driven excitable people mad.
Now he would compose all this to sweeter purposes; and the building of
the first organ became like the book of his life: it expanded to the
full compass of his nature, in its sorrow and delight. In long,
enjoyable days of wind and sun by the river-side, the seemingly
half-witted "brother" sought and found the needful varieties of reed.
The carpenters, under his instru