lightly over other strips of turf. And the world, that one looks out
upon through prison bars, that is so gloriously arched in the arm of
a flying buttress, or that lies prone at your feet from the dizzy
heights of the rock clefts, is not the world in which you, daily, do
your petty stretch of toil, in which you laugh and ache, sorrow, sigh,
and go down to your grave.

The secret of this deep attraction may lie in the fact of one's being
in a world that is built on a height. Much, doubtless, of the charm
lies, also, in the reminders of all the human life that, since the
early dawn of history, has peopled this hill. One has the sense
of living at a tremendously high mental pressure; of impressions,
emotions, sensations crowding upon the mind; of one's whole meager
outfit of memory, of poetic equipment, and of imaginative furnishing
being unequal to the demand made by even the most hurried tour of the
great buildings, or the most flitting review of the noble massing of
the clouds and the hilly seas.

The very emptiness and desolation of all the buildings on the hill
help to accentuate their splendor. The stage is magnificently set;
the curtain, even, is lifted. One waits for the coming on of kingly
shapes, for the pomp of trumpets, for the pattering of a mighty host.
But, behold, all is still. And one sits and sees only a shadowy
company pass and repass across that glorious mise-en-scéne.

For, in a certain sense, I know no other medieval mass of buildings as
peopled as are these. The dead shapes seem to fill the vast halls. The
Salle des Chevaliers is crowded, daily, with a brilliant gathering of
knights, who sweep the trains of their white damask mantles, edged
with ermine, over the dulled marble of the floor; two by two they