of the very forms of vassalage. To be the servant of love, to have
offended, to taste the subtle luxury of chastisement, of
reconciliation--the religious spirit, too, knows that, and meets just
there, as in Rousseau, the delicacies of the earthly love. Here,
under this strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air,
exotic flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote and
unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light
almost shining through them. Surely, such loves were too fragile and
adventurous to last more than for a moment.

That monastic religion of the Middle Age was, in fact, in many of its
bearings, like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses: and a
religion which is a disorder of the senses must always be subject to
illusions. Reverie, illusion, delirium: they are the three stages of
a fatal descent both in the religion and the loves of the Middle Age.
Nowhere has the impression of this delirium been conveyed as by
Victor Hugo in Notre Dame de Paris. The [218] strangest creations of
sleep seem here, by some appalling licence, to cross the limit of the
dawn. The English poet too has learned the secret. He has diffused
through King Arthur's Tomb the maddening white glare of the sun, and
tyranny of the moon, not tender and far-off, but close down--the
sorcerer's moon, large and feverish. The colouring is intricate and
delirious, as of "scarlet lilies." The influence of summer is like a
poison in one's blood, with a sudden bewildered sickening of life and
all things. In Galahad: a Mystery, the frost of Christmas night on
the chapel stones acts as a strong narcotic: a sudden shrill ringing
pierces through the numbness: a voice proclaims that the Grail has
gone forth through the great forest. It is in the Blue Closet that
this delirium reaches its height with a singular beauty, reserved
perhaps for the enjoyment of the few.