The World of Romance | Page 2

waving of banners, as the knights and lords and men-at-arms
passed to and fro along the battlements; and we could see too in the
town the three spires of the three churches; and the spire of the
Cathedral, which was the tallest of the three, was gilt all over with gold,

and always at night-time a great lamp shone from it that hung in the
spire midway between the roof of the church and the cross at the top of
the spire. The Abbey where we built the Church was not girt by stone
walls, but by a circle of poplar trees, and whenever a wind passed over
them, were it ever so little a breath, it set them all a-ripple; and when
the wind was high, they bowed and swayed very low, and the wind, as
it lifted the leaves, and showed their silvery white sides, or as again in
the lulls of it, it let them drop, kept on changing the trees from green to
white, and white to green; moreover, through the boughs and trunks of
the poplars, we caught glimpses of the great golden corn sea, waving,
waving, waving for leagues and leagues; and among the corn grew
burning scarlet poppies, and blue corn-flowers; and the corn-flowers
were so blue, that they gleamed, and seemed to burn with a steady light,
as they grew beside the poppies among the gold of the wheat. Through
the corn sea ran a blue river, and always green meadows and lines of
tall poplars followed its windings. The old Church had been burned,
and that was the reason why the monks caused me to build the new one;
the buildings of the Abbey were built at the same time as the
burned-down Church, more than a hundred years before I was born,
and they were on the north side of the Church, and joined to it by a
cloister of round arches, and in the midst of the cloister was a lawn, and
in the midst of that lawn, a fountain of marble, carved round about with
flowers and strange beasts, and at the edge of the lawn, near the round
arches, were a great many sun-flowers that were all in blossom on that
autumn day, and up many of the pillars of the cloister crept
passion-flowers and roses. Then farther from the Church, and past the
cloister and its buildings, were many detached buildings, and a great
garden round them, all within the circle of the poplar trees; in the
garden were trellises covered over with roses, and convolvolus, and the
great-leaved fiery nasturium; and specially all along by the poplar trees
were there trellises, but on these grew nothing but deep crimson roses;
the hollyhocks too were all out in blossom at that time, great spires of
pink, and orange, and red, and white, with their soft, downy leaves. I
said that nothing grew on the trellises by the poplars but crimson roses,
but I was not quite right, for in many places the wild flowers had crept
into the garden from without; lush green briony, with green-white
blossoms, that grows so fast, one could almost think that we see it grow,

and deadly nightshade, La bella donna, O! so beautiful; red berry, and
purple, yellow-spiked flower, and deadly, cruel-looking, dark green
leaf, all growing together in the glorious days of early autumn. And in
the midst of the great garden was a conduit, with its sides carved with
histories from the Bible, and there was on it too, as on the fountain in
the cloister, much carving of flowers and strange beasts. Now the
Church itself was surrounded on every side but the north by the
cemetery, and there were many graves there, both of monks and of
laymen, and often the friends of those, whose bodies lay there, had
planted flowers about the graves of those they loved. I remember one
such particularly, for at the head of it was a cross of carved wood, and
at the foot of it, facing the cross, three tall sun-flowers; then in the
midst of the cemetery was a cross of stone, carved on one side with the
Crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, and on the other with our Lady
holding the Divine Child. So that day, that I specially remember, in
autumn-tide, when the Church was nearly finished, I was carving in the
central porch of the west front; (for I carved all those bas-reliefs in the
west front with my own hand;) beneath me my sister Margaret was
carving at the flower-work, and the little quatrefoils that carry the signs
of the zodiac and emblems of the months: now my sister Margaret was
rather more than twenty years old at that time, and she was very
beautiful, with