The centuries dropped like autumn leaves
in one's road, and one was not fined for running over them too
fast. When the thirteenth lost breath, the fourteenth caught on,
and the sixteenth ran close ahead. The hunt for the Virgin's
glass opened rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century ran
riot in sensuous worship. Then the ocean of religion, which had
flooded France, broke into Shelley's light dissolved in
star-showers thrown, which had left every remote village strewn
with fragments that flashed like jewels, and were tossed into
hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness. One dared not pass a
parish church in Champagne or Touraine without stopping to look
for its window of fragments, where one's glass discovered the
Christ-child in his manger, nursed by the head of a fragmentary
donkey, with a Cupid playing into its long ears from the
balustrade of a Venetian palace, guarded by a legless Flemish
leibwache, standing on his head with a broken halbert; all
invoked in prayer by remnants of the donors and their children
that might have been drawn by Fouquet or Pinturicchio, in colors
as fresh and living as the day they were burned in, and with
feeling that still consoled the faithful for the paradise they
had paid for and lost. France abounds in sixteenth-century glass.
Paris alone contains acres of it, and the neighborhood within
fifty miles contains scores of churches where the student may
still imagine himself three hundred years old, kneeling before
the Virgin's window in the silent solitude of an empty faith,
crying his culp, beating his breast, confessing his historical
sins, weighed down by the rubbish of sixty-six years' education,
and still desperately hoping to understand.
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