that in which it ordinarily moves.  The thin, narrow, and unfruitful experience of to-day and yesterday was amplified by all the lives that had made our life, and the blood of which we are only a last expression, the race that is older even than Rome seemed in this revelation of continuity to be gathered up into one intense and passionate moment.  The pagan altar of Tiberius, the legend of Dionysius, the whole circle of the wars came into this one pageant, and the old man in his office and his blessing was understood by all the crowd before him to transmit the centuries.  A rich woman thrust a young child forward, and he stopped and stooped with difficulty to touch its hair.  As he approached the traveller it was as though there had come great and sudden news to him, or the sound of unexpected and absorbing music.

The procession went on and closed; the High Mass followed; it lasted a very long time, and the traveller went out before the crowd had moved and found himself again in the glare of the sun on the Parvis.

He went over the bridge to find his eating-shop near the archives, and eat the first food of that day, thinking as he went that certainly there are an infinity of lives side by side in our cities, and each ignores the rest; and yet, that to pass from what we know of these to what we do not—­though it is the most wonderful journey in the world—­is one that no one undertakes unless accident or a good fortune pushes him on.  He desired to make another such journey.

He came back to find me in London, and spoke to me of Paris as of a city newly discovered:  as I listened I thought I saw an arena.

In a plain of the north, undistinguished by great hills, open to the torment of the sky, the gods had traced an arena wherein were to be fought out the principal battles of a later age.

* * * * *

Spirits lower than the divine, spirits intermediate, have been imagined by men wiser than ourselves to have some power over the world—­a power which we might vanquish in a special manner, but still a power.  To such conceptions the best races of Europe cling; upon such a soil are grown the legends that tell us most about our dark, and yet enormous, human fate.  These intermediate spirits have been called in all the older creeds “the gods.”  It is in the nature of the Church to frown upon these dreams; but I, as I listened to him, saw clearly that plain wherein the gods had marked out an arena for mankind.

It was oval, as should be a theatre for any show, with heights around it insignificant, but offering a vantage ground whence could be watched the struggle in the midst.  There was a sacred centre—­an island and a mount—­and, within the lines, so great a concourse of gladiatorial souls as befits the greatest of spectacles.  I say, I do not know how far such visions are permitted, nor how far the right reason of the Church condemns them; but the dream returned to me very powerfully, recalling my boyhood, when the traveller told me his story.  I also therefore went and caught the fresh gale of the stream of the Seine in flood, and saw the many roofs of Paris quite clear after the rain, and read the writings of the men I mixed with and heard the noise of the city.