the first time the inlaid steps, the fluted columns, the
sculptured bas-reliefs and canopy of the marvellous shrine. The
marble, worn and mellowed by the subtle hand of time, took on an
unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive in some remote way of the honey-
colored columns of the Parthenon, but more mystic, more complex,
a color not born of the sun's inveterate kiss, but made up of
cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs' tombs,
and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase and
ruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of
Siena, or burns like a hidden fire through the Madonna of Gian
Bellini in the Church of the Redeemer, at Venice; the light of
the Middle Ages, richer, more solemn, more significant than the
limpid sunshine of Greece.

"The church was silent, but for the wail of the priest and the
occasional scraping of a chair against the floor, and as I sat
there, bathed in that light, absorbed in rapt contemplation of
the marble miracle which rose before me, cunningly wrought as a
casket of ivory and enriched with jewel-like incrustations and
tarnished gleams of gold, I felt myself borne onward along a
mighty current, whose source seemed to be in the very beginning
of things, and whose tremendous waters gathered as they went all
the mingled streams of human passion and endeavor. Life in all
its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed
weaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the
spirit of man had passed I knew that my foot had once been
familiar.

"As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna
seemed to melt and flow into their primal forms so that the