easures of the East, the
lessons of Scripture itself. Side by side with these there is that
singular form of the religious spirit which has been so constantly
misunderstood, and which, except in a very few persons, seems so rare
nowadays--the faith which is implicit without being imbecile,
childlike without being childish, devout with a fearless familiarity,
the spirit to which the _Dies Irae_ and the sermons of St Francis were
equally natural expressions, and which, if it could sometimes
exasperate itself into the practices of the Inquisition, found a far
commoner and more genuine expression in the kindly humanities of the
_Ancren Riwle_. There is no lack of knowledge and none of inquiry;
though in embarking on the enormous ocean of ignorance, it is inquiry
not cabined and cribbed by our limits. In particular, there is an
almost unparalleled, a certainly unsurpassed, activity in metaphysical
speculation, a fence-play of thought astonishing in its accuracy and
style. As Poetry slowly disintegrates and exfoliates itself into
Prose, literary gifts for which verse was unsuited develop themselves
in the vernaculars; and the chronicle--itself so lately an
epic--becomes a history, or at least a memoir; the orator, sacred or
profane, quits the school rhetoric and its familiar Latin vehicle for
more direct means of persuasion; the jurist gives these vernaculars
precision by adopting them.

But with and through and above all these various spirits there is most
of all that abstract spirit of poetry, which, though not possessed by
the Middle Ages or by Romance alone, seems somehow to be a more
inseparable and pervading familiar of Romance and of the Middle Ages
than of any other time and any other kind of literature. The sense of
mystery, which had rarely troubled the keen intellect of the Greek and
the sturdy common-sense of the Roman, which was even a little degraded
and impoverished (except in the Jewish prophets and in a few other
places) by the busy activity of Oriental imagination, which we
ourselves have banished, or think we have banished, to a few "poets'
scrolls," was always present to the mediaeval mind. In its broadest and
coarsest jests, in its most laborious and (as we are pleased to call
them) dullest expansions of stories, in its most wire-drawn and most
lifeless allegory, in its most irritating admixture of science and
fable, there is always hard by, always ready to break in, the sense of
the great and wonderful