and dominant angel, that place, seen
once, abides entire in the memory with all its own
accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled
all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not
scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance. The
untravelled spirit of place--not to be pursued, for it never
flies, but always to be discovered, never absent, without
variation--lurks in the byways and rules over the towers,
indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always
in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet and nimble
within its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them.
Long white roads outside have mere suggestions of it and
prophecies; they give promise, not of its coming, for it
abides, but of a new and singular and unforseen goal for our
present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to be made."

How many a traveller moves from place to place, not realising anything
beyond the transportation of his body! Yet in every town there is this
fresh acquaintance, this lifelong friendship, that shall last while
his own memory lasts, that is as fresh for him as for a thousand
before him, and for tens of thousands after. When the bells of an
unknown city have given me their first greeting, my first
acknowledgment of that compelling invitation is to see those buildings
in the town that can become alive again beneath their echoes. Of such
churches, of such civic buildings, of private houses, of monuments by
unknown hands for unknown owners, Rouen is full in almost all her
streets.

"La dans le passe tu peux vivre
Chaque monument est un livre
Chaque pierre un souvenir."

The history of the Middle Ages is written upon magnificent and
enduring volumes, and a great responsibility is laid on those who
would deface the writing on the wall. Their virtues and vices, their
jests and indecencies, their follies and their fears, are all writ
large upon the pages of a book that was ever open to every passer-by,
and that remains for us to read. It is no rhetorical exaggeration,
that "_Ceci tuera cela_" of Victor Hugo. Our smaller doings are
recorded in the perishable print of fading paper, and we have no care
to stamp what little we have left of character upon our buildings. No
one, at least it may be fervently hoped, will try in the future to
reconstruct the ideals or the life of the Victorian Era from its
architectu