m blossomed gracefully, blossomed in
cornice and capital and pliant arch-line, as vigorous as they were
graceful, and rose on high quickly. Almost suddenly tie-beam and
rafter knit themselves together into the stone, and the dark, dry,
roomy place was closed in securely to this day. Mere audible music,
certainly, had counted for something in the operations of an art, held
at its best (as we know) to be a sort of music made visible. That idle
singer, one might fancy, by an art beyond art, had attracted beams and
stones into their fit places. And there, sure enough, he still sits,
as a final decorative touch, by way of apex on the gable which looks
northward, though much weather-worn, and with an ugly gap between the
shoulder and the fingers on the harp,* as if, literally, he had cut off
his right hand and put it from him:--King David, or an angel? guesses
the careless tourist. The space below has been lettered. After a
little puzzling you recognise there the relics of a familiar verse from
a Latin psalm Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum,+ and the rest:
inscribed as well as may be in Greek characters. Prior Saint-Jean
caused it to be so inscribed, absurdly, during his last days there.

[155] And is not the human body, too, a building, with architectural
laws, a structure, tending by the very forces which primarily held it
together to drop asunder in time? Not in vain, it seemed, had Prior
Saint-Jean come to this mystic place for the improvement of his body's
health. Thenceforth that fleshly tabernacle had housed him, had housed
his cunning, overwrought and excitable soul, ever the better day by
day, and he began to feel his bodily health to be a positive quality or
force, the presence near him of that singular being having surely
something to do with this result. He and his fascinations, his music,
himself, might at least be taken for an embodiment of all those genial
influences of earth and sky, and the easy ways of living here, which
made him turn, with less of an effort than he had known for many years
past, to his daily tasks, and sink so regularly, so immediately, to
wholesome rest on returning from them. It was as if Brother Apollyon
himself abhorred the spectacle of distress, and mainly for his own
satisfaction charmed away other people's maladies. The mere touch of
that ice-cold hand, laid on the feverish brow, when the Prior lapsed
from time to time into his former troubles, certainly calmed the
respira