reasonable"
the law of one's own commonwealth was the voice of God. He spoke about
Joan of Arc; and how she had managed to be a bold and successful soldier
while still preserving her virtue and practising her religion; then he
gave them each a little paper book. To which they replied (after a brief
interval for reflection):

Pongprongperesklang pour la patrie,
Tambraugtararronc pour la patrie.

which I feel sure was the best and most pointed reply.

While all this was happening feelings quite indescribable crowded
about my own darkening brain, as the clouds crowded above the darkening
church. They were so entirely of the elements and the passions that I
cannot utter them in an idea, but only in an image. It seemed to me
that we were barricaded in this church, but we could not tell what was
happening outside the church. The monstrous and terrible jewels of the
windows darkened or glistened under moving shadow or light, but the
nature of that light and the shapes of those shadows we did not know and
hardly dared to guess. The dream began, I think, with a dim fancy that
enemies were already in the town, and that the enormous oaken doors were
groaning under their hammers. Then I seemed to suppose that the town
itself had been destroyed by fire, and effaced, as it may be thousands
of years hence, and that if I opened the door I should come out on a
wilderness as flat and sterile as the sea. Then the vision behind the
veil of stone and slate grew wilder with earthquakes. I seemed to
see chasms cloven to the foundations of all things, and letting up an
infernal dawn. Huge things happily hidden from us had climbed out of
the abyss, and were striding about taller than the clouds. And when the
darkness crept from the sapphires of Mary to the sanguine garments of
St. John I fancied that some hideous giant was walking round the church
and looking in at each window in turn.

Sometimes, again, I thought of that church with coloured windows as a
ship carrying many lanterns struggling in a high sea at night. Sometimes
I thought of it as a great coloured lantern itself, hung on an iron
chain out of heaven and tossed and swung to and fro by strong wings, the
wings of the princes of the air. But I never thought of it or the young
men inside it save as something precious and in peril, or of the things
outside but as something barbaric and enormous.

I know there are some who cannot sympathise with such sentiments of
limita