OIDERY.

"And now as I turn these volumes over,
And see what lies between cover and cover,
What treasures of art these pages hold,
All ablaze with crimson and gold....
Yes, I might almost say to the Lord,
Here is a copy of Thy Word
Written out with much toil and pain;
Take it, O Lord, and let it be
As something I have done for Thee!
How sweet the air is! how fair the scene!
I wish I had as lovely a green
To paint my landscapes and my leaves!
How the swallows twitter under the eaves!
There, now, there is one in her nest;
I can just catch a glimpse of her head and breast,
And will sketch her thus, in her quiet nook,
For the margin of my Gospel-book."

LONGFELLOW, "The Golden Legend" ("The
Scriptorium"), p. 176.

"Upon Thy right hand did stand the queen in a vesture of
gold, wrought about with divers colours.... The king's
daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of
wrought gold. She shall be brought unto the king in
raiment of needlework."--Psalm xlv. 10, 14, 15.

If the Bride is the type of the Church, how truly has she been, for
eighteen centuries, throughout Christendom, adorned with gold, and
arrayed in raiment of needlework.

By ecclesiastical embroideries, we mean, of course, Christian work for
Christian churches. The first pictured decorations of our era, in
early frescoes, mosaics, and illuminated MSS., and the first specimens
that have come down to us of needlework and textiles, testify by their
_naivete_ to their date.[479]

The prosperity of the Church's hierarchy was founded on the ruins of
the Empire, over which Attila had boasted that where his horse trod no
grass grew; and truly the cultivated art of those splendid days had
lapsed at once to a poverty of design and barrenness of ideas which
would soon have dwindled into mere primitive forms, had not a fresh
Oriental impulse arrived from Syria, Egypt, and Byzantium,--and then
the arts were born anew.[480] The continuity was broken; yet, being
devoted to the service of the Church, the new arts were by it moulded
and fostered. Little lamps twinkled here and there in monastic houses.
Hangings for the churches, coverings for the altars, robes for the
priests, occupied the artist and the embroiderer.

The forms, the colours, the uses, were adapting themselves to become
the symbols of orthodoxies and