Page 595 - swanns-way

na of geology—and as remote from human history as the
Ocean itself, or the Great Bear, with its wild race of fisher-
men for whom, no more than for their whales, had there
been any Middle Ages—it had been a great joy to me to
see it suddenly take its place in the order of the centuries,
with a stored consciousness of the romanesque epoch, and
to know that the gothic trefoil had come to diversify those
wild rocks also, at the appointed hour, like those frail but
hardy plants which, in the Polar regions, when the spring
returns, scatter their stars about the eternal snows. And if
gothic art brought to those places and people a classifica-
tion which, otherwise, they lacked, they too conferred one
upon it in return. I tried to form a picture in my mind of
how those fishermen had lived, the timid and unsuspected
essay towards social intercourse which they had attempted
there, clustered upon a promontory of the shores of Hell, at
the foot of the cliffs of death; and gothic art seemed to me
a more living thing now that, detaching it from the towns
in which, until then, I had always imagined it, I could see
how, in a particular instance, upon a reef of savage rocks,
it had taken root and grown until it flowered in a tapering
spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the most famous
of the statues at Balbec,—shaggy, blunt-faced Apostles, the
Virgin from the porch,—and I could scarcely breathe for
joy at the thought that I might myself, one day, see them
take a solid form against their eternal background of salt
fog. Thereafter, on dear, tempestuous February nights, the
wind—breathing into my heart, which it shook no less vio-
lently than the chimney of my bedroom, the project of a

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