“And there is not a park, whether older or more recent than the groves of Jumieges, which does not exhibit the same forms with equal exactitude; but what Nature could not give was the prodigious art, the deep symbolical knowledge, the over-strung but tranquil mysticism of the believers who erected cathedrals.  But for them the church in its rough-hewn state, as Nature had formed it, was but a soulless thing, a sketch, rudimentary; the embryo only of a basilica, varying with the seasons and the days, at once living and inert, awaking only to the roaring organ of the wind, the swaying roof of boughs wrung with the slightest breath; it was lax and often sullen; the yielding victim of the breeze, the resigned slave of the rain; it was lighted only by the sunshine that filtered between the diamond and heart-shaped leaves, as if through the meshes of a green network.  Man’s genius collected the scattered gleams, condensed them in roses and broad blades, to pour it into his avenues of white shafts; and even in the darkest weather the glass was splendid, catching the very last rays of sunset, dressing Christ and the Virgin in the most fabulous magnificence, and almost realizing on earth the only attire that beseems the glorified Body, a robe of mingled flame.

“Really, when you come to think of it, a cathedral is a superhuman thing!

“Starting in our lands from the old Roman crypt, from the vault, crushed like the soul by humility and fear, and bowed before the infinite Majesty whose praise they hardly dared to sing, the churches gradually waxed bolder; they gave an upward spring to the semicircular arch, lengthening it to an almond shape, leaping from the earth, uplifting roofs, heightening naves, breaking out into a thousand sculptured forms all round the choir, and flinging heavenward, like prayers, their rapturous piles of stones!  They symbolized the loving tenderness of orisons; they became more trusting, more playful, more daring in the sight of God.

“Each and all seemed to smile, as soon as they gave up their dismal skeleton and strove upwards.

“The Romanesque, I fancy, must have been born old,” Durtal went on after a pause.  “At any rate it has always remained gloomy and timid.

“Although at Jumieges, for instance, it has attained grandiose dimensions with its enormous span opening like a vast portal to the sky, it still is depressing.  The semicircular arch, in fact, bends to the earth, for it has not the point, soaring upwards, of the lancet arch.

“Oh! to think of the tears, the dolorous murmurs of those thick partitions, those smoky vaults, those arches resting on squat pillars, those almost speechless blocks of stone, those sober ornaments expressing their symbolism so curtly!  The Romanesque is the La Trappe of architecture; we find it sheltering the austerest Orders, the sternest Brotherhoods, kneeling in ashes, and chanting in an undertone with bowed heads none but penitential Psalms.  These massive