Is He that exacting, that exotic Deity, lusting only for adoration, eternally gluttonous of praise and never surfeited, whom squeamish indoor men, making Him the fetish of their closets, have reared for heaven’s type? O, find Him in the blown trees and running water; in the carol of sweet birds; in the mines from whose entrails are drawn our ploughshares; yea, in the pursuit of maid by man! So, in these long walks and rests of life, shall He be no less our Prince because He is our joyous comrade. For this I know: Not to a pastor, a lord, a parent himself, doth the soul of the youth go out as to the companion of his own age and freedom. ’Christ comes again as He journeyed with His Apostles, the bright wise comrade, fitting earth to heaven in the puzzle of the spheres. We know Him Human, my father, feeling the joy of weariness for repose’ sake; not disdaining the cool inn’s sanctuary; expounding love by forbearance. He beareth Beauty redeemed on His brow. Before the clear gaze of His eyes all heaped sophistries melt away like April snow. He calleth us to the woods and meadows. _Quasimodo geniti infantes rationabile sine dolo lac concupiscete_. O, mine eyelids droop! We are seldom at rest here before two o’ the morning. The beds have trellised gratings by day, to keep the dogs from smirching their coverlets. _Ora pro me_!’ *CHAPTER VIII* The castle at the Porta Giovia had its glooms as well as its pleasances. Indeed, it may be questioned if the latter were not rather in proportion to the former as a tiger’s gay hide is to the strength and ferocity it clothes. Built originally for a great keep, or, as it were, breakwater, to stem the rush of barbarian seas which were wont to come storming down from the north-west, its constructors had aimed at nothing less than its everlastingness. So thick were its bastioned walls, so thick the curtains which divided its inner and outer wards, a whole warren of human ’runs’ could honeycomb without appreciably weakening them. Hidden within its screens and massy towers, like the gnawings of a foul and intricate cancer, ran dark passages which discharged themselves here and there into dreadful dungeons, or secret-places not guessed at in the common tally of its rooms. These oubliettes were hideous with blotched and spotted memories; rotten with the dew of suffering; eloquent in their terror and corruption and darkness, of that same self-sick, self-blinded tyranny which, in place of Love and Justice, the trusty bodyguards, must turn always to cruelty and thick walls for its security. The hiss and purr of subterranean fire, the grinding of low-down grated jaws, the flop and echo of stagnant water, oozed from a stagnant moat into vermin-swarming, human-haunted cellars,—these were sounds that spoke even less of grief to others than of the hellish ferment in the soul of him who had raised them for his soul’s pacifying.