A
charm indefinable, but replete with subtle attractions, lurks in every
one of these dungeons.
The great halls have a power to make one retraverse their space I have
yet to find under other vaulted chambers. The grass that is set,
like a green jewel, in the arabesques of the cloister, is a bit of
greensward the feet press with a different tread to that which skips
lightly over other strips of turf. And the world, that one looks out
upon through prison bars, that is so gloriously arched in the arm of
a flying buttress, or that lies prone at your feet from the dizzy
heights of the rock clefts, is not the world in which you, daily, do
your petty stretch of toil, in which you laugh and ache, sorrow, sigh,
and go down to your grave.
The secret of this deep attraction may lie in the fact of one's being
in a world that is built on a height. Much, doubtless, of the charm
lies, also, in the reminders of all the human life that, since the
early dawn of history, has peopled this hill. One has the sense
of living at a tremendously high mental pressure; of impressions,
emotions, sensations crowding upon the mind; of one's whole meager
outfit of memory, of poetic equipment, and of imaginative furnishing
being unequal to the demand made by even the most hurried tour of the
great buildings, or the most flitting review of the noble massing of
the clouds and the hilly seas.
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