through
the dusk. A priest was at the high altar, his white cope a livid spot in
the incense-laden obscurity, the light of the candles flickering up and
down like fireflies about his head; a few people knelt near by. We stole
behind them and sat down on a bench close to the tabernacle of Orcagna.

"Strange to say, though Florence was not new to me, I had never been in
the church before; and in that magical light I saw for the first time
the inlaid steps, the fluted columns, the sculptured bas-reliefs and
canopy of the marvellous shrine. The marble, worn and mellowed by the
subtle hand of time, took on an unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive in
some remote way of the honey-colored columns of the Parthenon, but more
mystic, more complex, a color not born of the sun's inveterate kiss,
but made up of cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs'
tombs, and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase and
ruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of Siena,
or burns like a hidden fire through the Madonna of Gian Bellini in the
Church of the Redeemer, at Venice; the light of the Middle Ages, richer,
more solemn, more significant than the limpid sunshine of Greece.

"The church was silent, but for the wail of the priest and the
occasional scraping of a chair against the floor, and as I sat there,
bathed in that light, absorbed in rapt contemplation of the marble
miracle which rose before me, cunningly wrought as a casket of ivory and
enriched with jewel-like incrustations and tarnished gleams of gold, I
felt myself borne onward along a mighty current, whose source seemed to
be in the very beginning of things, and whose tremendous waters gathered
as they went all the mingled streams of human passion and endeavor.
Life in all its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed
weaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the spirit
of man had passed I knew that my foot had once been familiar.

"As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna seemed to
melt and flow into their primal forms so that the folded lotus of
the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with the runic knots and
fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all the plastic terror and beauty
born of man's hand from the Ganges to the Baltic quivered and mingled
in Orcagna's apotheosis of Mary. And so the river bore me on, past the
alien face of antique civilizations and the familiar wonders of