apparently
intended for suspension in church, and designed to portray the whole
subject of which the figure in the stained glass was a portion.

Next afternoon accordingly I repaired to the priest's house, in reality
a little Gothic building, part perhaps of an ancient manor-house, close
to the village church. In the front garden, flower-garden and potager
in one, the bees were busy among the autumn growths--many-coloured
asters, bignonias, scarlet-beans, and the old-fashioned parsonage
flowers. The courteous owner readily showed me his tapestries, some of
which hung on the walls of his parlour and staircase by way of a
background for the display of the other curiosities of which he was a
collector. Certainly, those tapestries and the stained glass dealt
with the same theme. In both were the same musical instruments--pipes,
cymbals, long reed-like trumpets. The story, indeed, included the
building of an organ, just such an instrument, only on a larger scale,
as was standing in the old priest's library, though almost soundless
now, whereas in certain of the woven pictures the hearers appear as if
transported, some of them shouting rapturously to the organ music. A
sort of mad vehemence prevails, indeed, throughout the delicate
bewilderments of the whole series--[54] giddy dances, wild animals
leaping, above all perpetual wreathings of the vine, connecting, like
some mazy arabesque, the various presentations of one oft-repeated
figure, translated here out of the clear-coloured glass into the
sadder, somewhat opaque and earthen hues of the silken threads. The
figure was that of the organ-builder himself, a flaxen and flowery
creature, sometimes wellnigh naked among the vine-leaves, sometimes
muffled in skins against the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk,
but always with a strong impress of real character and incident from
the veritable streets of Auxerre. What is it? Certainly,
notwithstanding its grace, and wealth of graceful accessories, a
suffering, tortured figure. With all the regular beauty of a pagan
god, he has suffered after a manner of which we must suppose pagan gods
incapable. It was as if one of those fair, triumphant beings had cast
in his lot with the creatures of an age later than his own, people of
larger spiritual capacity and assuredly of a larger capacity for
melancholy. With this fancy in my mind, by the help of certain notes,
which lay in the priest's curious library, upon the history o