it, and which no other heavenly majesty has rivalled.  As one watches the light play on it, one is still overcome by the glories of the jewelled rose and its three gemmed pendants; one feels a little of the effect she meant it to produce even on infidels, Moors, and heretics, but infinitely more on the men who feared and the women who adored her;—­not to dwell too long upon it, one admits that hers is the only Church.  One would admit anything that she should require.  If you had only the soul of a shrimp, you would crawl, like the Abbe Suger, to kiss her feet.

Unfortunately she is gone, or comes here now so very rarely that we never shall see her; but her genius remains as individual here as the genius of Blanche of Castile and Pierre de Dreux in the transepts.  That the three lancets were her own taste, as distinctly as the Trianon was the taste of Louis XIV, is self-evident.  They represent all that was dearest to her; her Son’s glory on her right; her own beautiful life in the middle; her royal ancestry on her left:  the story of her divine right, thrice-told.  The pictures are all personal, like family portraits.  Above them the man who worked in 1200 to carry out the harmony, and to satisfy the Virgin’s wishes, has filled his rose with a dozen or two little compositions in glass, which reveal their subjects only to the best powers of a binocle.  Looking carefully, one discovers at last that this gorgeous combination of all the hues of Paradise contains or hides a Last Judgment—­the one subject carefully excluded from the old work, and probably not existing on the south portal for another twenty years.  If the scheme of the western rose dates from 1200, as is reasonable to suppose, this Last Judgment is the oldest in the church, and makes a link between the theology of the first crusade, beneath, and the theology of Pierre Mauclerc in the south porch.  The churchman is the only true and final judge on his own doctrine, and we neither know nor care to know the facts; but we are as good judges as he of the feeling, and we are at full liberty to feel that such a Last Judgment as this was never seen before or since by churchman or heretic, unless by virtue of the heresy which held that the true Christian must be happy in being damned since such is the will of God.  That this blaze of heavenly light was intended, either by the Virgin or by her workmen, to convey ideas of terror or pain, is a notion which the Church might possibly preach, but which we sinners knew to be false in the thirteenth century as well as we know it now.  Never in all these seven hundred years has one of us looked up at this rose without feeling it to be Our Lady’s promise of Paradise.