“Gargoyled with greyhounds, and with many lions

Made of fine gold, with divers sundry dragons.”

You step into its shade and coolness out of the hot streets of life; a mysterious light streams through the painted glass of the marigold windows, staining the cusps and crumpled leaves of the window-shafts, and the cherubs and holy-water-stoups below.  Here and there is an image of the Virgin Mary; and other images, “in divers vestures, called weepers, stand in housings made about the tomb”; and, above all, swells the vast dome of heaven, with its star-mouldings, and the flaming constellations, like the mosaics in the dome of St. Peter’s.  Have you not heard funeral psalms from the chauntry?  Have you not heard the sound of church-bells, as I promised; mysterious sounds from the Past and Future, as from the belfries outside the cathedral; even such a mournful, mellow, watery peal of bells, as is heard sometimes at sea, from cities afar off below the horizon?

I know not how this Romanesque, and at times flamboyant, style of architecture may please thecritics.  They may wish, perhaps, that I had omitted some of my many ornaments, my arabesques, and roses, and fantastic spouts, and Holy-Roods and Gallilee-steeples.  But would it then have been Romanesque?

But perhaps, gentle reader, thou art one of those, who think the days of Romance gone forever.  Believe it not!  O, believe it not!  Thou hast at this moment in thy heart as sweet a romance as was ever written.  Thou art not less a woman, because thou dost not sit aloft in a tower, with a tassel-gentle on thy wrist!  Thou art not less a man, because thou wearest no hauberk, nor mail-sark, and goest not on horseback after foolish adventures!  Nay, nay!  Every one has a Romance in his own heart.  All that has blessed or awed the world lies there; and

“The oracle within him, that which lives,

He must invoke and question,—­not dead books,

Not ordinances, not mould-rotten papers.”

Sooner or later some passages of every one’s romance must be written, either in words or actions.  They will proclaim the truth; for Truth is thought, which has assumed its appropriate garments, either of words or actions; while Falsehood is thought, which, disguised in words or actions not its own, comes before the blind old world, as Jacob came before the patriarch Isaac, clothed in the goodly raiment of his brother Esau.  And the world, like the patriarch, is often deceived; for, though the voice is Jacob’s voice, yet the hands are the hands of Esau, and the False takes away the birth-right and the blessing from the True.  Hence it is, that the world so often lifts up its voice and weeps.

That very pleasing and fanciful Chinese Romance, the Shadow in the Water, ends with the hero’s marrying both the heroines.  I hope my gentle reader feels curious to know the end of this Romance, which is a shadow upon the earth; and see whether there be any marriage at all in it.