spacious, fragrant place, afloat with golden lights. Lit up over the
autumn fields at evening, the distant spires suggested the splendour
within, with so strong an imaginative effect, that he seemed scarcely
to know whether it was through the mental or bodily eye that he
beheld. When he came [27] thither at last, like many another well-
born youth, to join the episcopal household as a kind of half-
clerical page, he found (as happens in the actual testing of our
ideals) at once more and less than he had supposed; and his earlier
vision was a thing he could never precisely recover, or disentangle
from the supervening reality. What he saw, certainly, was greater
far in mere physical proportion, and incommensurable at first by
anything he knew--the volume of the wrought detail, the mass of the
component members, the bigness of the actual stones of the masonry,
contrary to the usual Gothic manner, and as if in reminiscence of
those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been
adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed
of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for her. Through
repeated dangers good-fortune has saved that unrivalled treasure of
stained glass; and then, as now, the word "awful," so often applied
to Gothic aisles, was for once really applicable. You enter, looking
perhaps for a few minutes' cool shelter from the summer noonday; and
the placid sunshine of La Beauce seems to have been transformed in a
moment into imperious, angry fire.

It was not in summer, however, that Gaston first set foot there; he
saw the beautiful city for the first time as if sheathed austerely in
repellent armour. In his most genial subsequent impressions of the
place there was always a lingering [28] trace of that famous frost
through which he made his way, wary of petrifying contact against
things without, to the great western portal, on Candlemas morning.