sight becomes as
piercing as those needles; and the world, the cruel world that caused
her suffering, is to her transparent as glass. Anon she rejoices over
it, as over a conquest of her making.

For is she not a queen, a queen with courtiers of her own? The crows
have clearly some connection with her. In grave, dignified body they
come like ancient augurs, to talk to her of passing things. The
wolves passing by salute her timidly with sidelong glances. The bear,
then oftener seen than now, would sometimes, in his heavily
good-natured way, seat himself awkwardly at the threshold of her den,
like a hermit calling on a fellow-hermit, just as we often see him in
the Lives of the Desert Fathers.

All those birds and beasts with whom men only made acquaintance in
hunting or slaying them, were outlawed as much as she. With all these
she comes to an understanding; for Satan as the chief outlaw, imparts
to his own the pleasures of natural freedom, the wild delight of
living in a world sufficient unto itself.

* * * * *

Rough freedom of loneliness, all hail! The whole earth seems still
clothed in a white shroud, held in bondage by a load of ice, of
pitiless crystals, so uniform, sharp, and agonizing. After the year
1200 especially, the world is shut in like a transparent tomb, wherein
all things look terribly motionless, hard, and stiff.

The Gothic Church has been called a "crystallization;" and so it truly
is. About 1300, architecture gave up all its old variety of form and
living fancies, to repeat itself for evermore, to vie with the
monotonous prisms of Spitzbergen, to become the true and awful
likeness of that hard crystal city, in which a dreadful dogma thought
to bury all life away.

But for all the props, buttresses, flying-buttresses, that keep the
monument up, one thing there is that makes it totter. There is no loud
battering from without, but a certain softness in the very
foundations, which attacks the crystal with an imperceptible thaw.
What thing do I mean? The humble stream of warm tears shed by a whole
world, until they have become a very sea of wailings. What do I call
it? A breath of the future, a stirring of the natural life, which
shall presently rise again in irresistible might. The fantastic
building of which more than one side is already sinking, says, not
without terror, to itself, "It is the breath of Satan."

Beneath this Hecla-glacier lies a volcano which has