ategy, or that essay upon arms, are not for one moment remembered.
Here (in the narrow street which I knew and was now following) St.
Bernard had upheld the sacrament in the shock of the first awakening--in
that twelfth century, when Julian stirred in his sleep. Beyond the
bridge, in Roman walls that still stand carefully preserved, the Church
of Gaul had sustained Athanasius, and determined the course of the
Christian centuries. I had passed upon my way the vast and empty room
where had been established the Terror; where had been forced by an angry
and compelling force the full return of equal laws upon Europe. Who
could remember in such an air the follies and the pottering of men who
analyse and put in categories and explain the follies of wealth and of
old age?

Good Lord, how little the academies became! I remembered the phrases
upon one side and upon the other which still live in the stones of the
city, carved and deep, but more lasting than are even the letters of
their inscription. I remembered the defiant sentence of Mad Dolet on his
statue there in the Quarter, the deliberate perversion of Plato, "And
when you are dead you shall no more be anything at all." I remembered
the "Ave Crux spes Unica"; and St. Just's "The words that we have spoken
will never be lost on earth"; and Danton's "Continual Daring," and the
scribbled Greek on the walls of the cathedral towers. For not only are
the air and the voice, but the very material of this town is filled with
words that remain. Certainly the philosophies and the negations dwindled
to be so small as at last to disappear, and to leave only the two
antagonists. Passion brooded over the silence of the morning; there was
great energy in the cool of the spring air, and up above, the forms the
clouds were taking were forms of gigantic powers.

I came, as the traveller had come, into the cathedral. It was not yet
within half an hour of the feast. There was still room to be found,
though with every moment the nave and the aisles grew fuller, until one
doubted how at the end so great a throng could be dismissed. They were
of all kinds. Some few were strangers holding in their hands books about
the building. Some few were devout men on travel, and praying at this
great office on the way: men from the islands, men from the places that
Spain has redeemed for the future in the new world. I saw an Irishman
near me, and two West Indians also, half negro, like the third of the
kings