Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in _undress_ often affects more than one in full costume.
"Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all?"
says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle--_alta maenia Romae_--rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.
I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of the parish (_filles de la paroisse_) fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum! (Look at Carlyle's article on Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but these two "filles de la paroisse,"--gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.
Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzäpfli's restive horse sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and all else.--I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick,--the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle,--and why? Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water,--which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.