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 of the works at the