awakening in thy heart celestial Memnon's music!

But of our Dilettantisms, and galvanised Dilettantisms; of Puseyism--O
Heavens, what shall we say of Puseyism, in comparison to
Twelfth-Century Catholicism? Little or nothing; for indeed it is a
matter to strike one dumb.

The Builder of this Universe was wise,
He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles:
The Plan He shap'd all Worlds and AEons by,
Was--Heavens!--Was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles?

That certain human souls, living on this practical Earth, should
think to save themselves and a ruined world by noisy theoretic
demonstrations and laudations of _the_ Church, instead of some
unnoisy, unconscious, but _practical_, total, heart-and-soul
demonstration of a Church: this, in the circle of revolving ages, this
also was a thing we were to see. A kind of penultimate thing,
precursor of very strange consummations; last thing but one? If there
is no atmosphere, what will it serve a man to demonstrate the
excellence of lungs? How much profitabler, when you can, like Abbot
Samson, breathe; and go along your way!

FOOTNOTES:

[21] _Jocelini Chronica_, p. 40.

[22] Ibid. p. 68.

[23] _Jocelini Chronica_, p. 43.

CHAPTER XVI.

ST. EDMUND.

Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices; human dwellings,
churches, church-steeples, barns;--all fallen now and vanished, but
useful while they stood. He built and endowed 'the Hospital of
Babwell;' built 'fit houses for the St. Edmundsbury Schools.' Many are
the roofs once 'thatched with reeds' which he 'caused to be covered
with tiles;' or if they were churches, probably 'with lead.' For all
ruinous incomplete things, buildings or other, were an eye-sorrow to
the man. We saw his 'great tower of St. Edmund's;' or at least the
roof-timbers of it, lying cut and stamped in Elmset Wood. To change
combustible decaying reed-thatch into tile or lead; and material,
still more, moral wreck into rain-tight order, what a comfort to
Samson!

* * * * *

One of the things he could not in any wise but rebuild was the great
Altar, aloft on which stood the Shrine itself; the great Altar, which
had been damaged by fire, by the careless rubbish and careless candle
of two somnolent Monks, one night,--the Shrine escaping almost as if
by miracle! Abbot Samson read his Monks a severe lecture: "A Dream one
of us had, that he saw St. Edmund naked and in lamentabl