And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight;the voice of the great half-military master-builder;the architect of spears.I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church;and I knew indeed that,under a scriptural figure,he had borne in either hand the trowel and the sword.
I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had marched out of the sacred East,alive and interlocked,like an army.
Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of the desert.He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid;and been woke at midnight by the wings of stone and brass,the tramping of the tall pillars,the trumpets of the waterspouts.On such a night every snake or sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner of the architecture.And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternally in the flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles like torches across dark lands and distant seas;till the whole mountain of music and darkness and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln hill.So for some hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty of the Gothic;then the last furniture-van shifted itself away;and I saw only a church tower in a quiet English town,round which the English birds were floating.