The uncle talks:—­

CHAPTER I

SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL

The Archangel loved heights.  Standing on the summit of the tower that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil crawling beneath, and the cock, symbol of eternal vigilance, perched on his mailed foot, Saint Michael held a place of his own in heaven and on earth which seems, in the eleventh century, to leave hardly room for the Virgin of the Crypt at Chartres, still less for the Beau Christ of the thirteenth century at Amiens.  The Archangel stands for Church and State, and both militant.  He is the conqueror of Satan, the mightiest of all created spirits, the nearest to God.  His place was where the danger was greatest; therefore you find him here.  For the same reason he was, while the pagan danger lasted, the patron saint of France.  So the Normans, when they were converted to Christianity, put themselves under his powerful protection.  So he stood for centuries on his Mount in Peril of the Sea, watching across the tremor of the immense ocean,-immensi tremor oceani,-as Louis XI, inspired for once to poetry, inscribed on the collar of the Order of Saint Michael which he created.  So soldiers, nobles, and monarchs went on pilgrimage to his shrine; so the common people followed, and still follow, like ourselves.

The church stands high on the summit of this granite rock, and on its west front is the platform, to which the tourist ought first to climb.  From the edge of this platform, the eye plunges down, two hundred and thirty-five feet, to the wide sands or the wider ocean, as the tides recede or advance, under an infinite sky, over a restless sea, which even we tourists can understand and feel without books or guides; but when we turn from the western view, and look at the church door, thirty or forty yards from the parapet where we stand, one needs to be eight centuries old to know what this mass of encrusted architecture meant to its builders, and even then one must still learn to feel it.  The man who wanders into the twelfth century is lost, unless he can grow prematurely young.

One can do it, as one can play with children.  Wordsworth, whose practical sense equalled his intuitive genius, carefully limited us to “a season of calm weather,” which is certainly best; but granting a fair frame of mind, one can still “have sight of that immortal sea” which brought us hither from the twelfth century; one can even travel thither and see the children sporting on the shore.  Our sense is partially atrophied from disuse, but it is still alive, at least in old people, who alone, as a class, have the time to be young.