their surfaces,
unless we could regain also the childish consciousness, or rather
unconsciousness, in ourselves, to take all that adroitly and with the
appropriate lightness of heart. The dream, however, has been left for
the most part in the usual vagueness of dreams: in their waking hours
people have been too busy to furnish it forth with details. What
follows is a quaint legend, with detail enough, of such a return of a
golden or poetically-gilded age (a denizen of old Greece itself
actually finding his way back again among men) as it happened in an
ancient town of medieval France.

Of the French town, properly so called, in which the products of
successive ages, not with-out lively touches of the present, are
blended together harmoniously, with a beauty SPECIFIC--a beauty
cisalpine and northern, yet at the same time quite distinct from the
massive German picturesque of Ulm, or Freiburg, or Augsburg, and of
which Turner has found the ideal in certain of his studies of the
rivers of France, a perfectly happy conjunction of river and town being
of the essence of its physiognomy--the town of Auxerre is perhaps the
most complete realisation to be found by the actual wanderer.
Certainly, for picturesque expression it is the most memorable of a
distinguished group of three in these parts,--Auxerre, Sens,
Troyes,--each gathered, as if with deliberate aim at such effect, about
the central mass of a huge grey cathedral.

Around Troyes the natural picturesque is to be sought only in the rich,
almost coarse, summer colouring of the Champagne country, of which the
very tiles, the plaster and brickwork of its tiny villages and great,
straggling, village-like farms have caught the warmth. The cathedral,
visible far and wide over the fields seemingly of loose wild-flowers,
itself a rich mixture of all the varieties of the Pointed style down to
the latest Flamboyant, may be noticed among the greater French churches
for breadth of proportions internally, and is famous for its almost
unrivalled treasure of stained glass, chiefly of a florid, elaborate,
later type, with much highly conscious artistic contrivance in design
as well as in colour. In one of the richest of its windows, for
instance, certain lines of pearly white run hither and thither, with
delightful distant effect, upon ruby and dark blue. Approaching nearer
you find it to be a Travellers' window, and those odd lines of white
the long walking-staves in the hands of Abra