In the Orlando Innamorato, Malagigi, the necromancer¹, puts all the company to sleep by reading to them from a book. Some books have this power of themselves and need no necromancer. Fearing, gentle reader, that mine may be of this kind, I have provided these introductory chapters, from time to time, like stalls or Misereres in a church, with flowery canopies² and poppy-heads over them, where thou mayest sit down and sleep.  
No,--the figure is not a bad one. This book does somewhat resemble a minster, in the Romanesque style, with pinnacles³, and flying buttresses⁴, and roofs,
 
"Gargoyled with greyhounds, and with many lions
 
Made of fine gold, with divers⁵ sundry⁶ dragons."
 
You step into its shade and coolness out of the hot streets of life; a mysterious light streams through the painted glass of the marigold windows, staining the cusps and crumpled⁷ leaves of the window-shafts, and the cherubs⁸ and holy-water-stoups below. Here and there is an image of the Virgin⁹ Mary; and other images, "in divers vestures, called weepers, stand in housings made about the tomb"; and, above all, swells¹⁰ the vast dome¹¹ of heaven, with its star-mouldings, and the flaming constellations¹², like the mosaics¹³ in the dome of St. Peter's. Have you not heard funeral psalms¹⁴ from the chauntry? Have you not heard the sound of church-bells, as I promised; mysterious sounds from the Past and Future, as from the belfries outside the cathedral; even such a mournful, mellow¹⁵, watery¹⁶ peal¹⁷ of bells, as is heard sometimes at sea, from cities afar off below the horizon?
 
I know not how this Romanesque, and at times flamboyant¹⁸, style of architecture may please thecritics. They may wish, perhaps, that I had omitted some of my many ornaments¹⁹, my arabesques²⁰, and roses, and fantastic spouts²¹, and Holy-Roods and Gallilee-steeples. But would it then have been Romanesque?
 
But perhaps, gentle reader, thou art one of those, who think the days of Romance gone forever. Believe it not! O, believe it not! Thou hast at this moment in thy heart as sweet a romance as was ever written. Thou art not less a woman, because thou dost not sit aloft in a tower, with a tassel-gentle on thy wrist! Thou art not less a man, because thou wearest no hauberk, nor mail-sark, and goest not on horseback after foolish adventures! Nay²², nay! Every one has a Romance in his own heart. All that has blessed or awed²³ the world lies there; and
 
"The oracle²⁴ within him, that which lives,
 
He must invoke²⁵ and question,--not dead books,
 
Not ordinances²⁶, not mould-rotten papers."
 
Sooner or later some passages of every one's romance must be written, either in words or actions. They will proclaim the truth; for Truth is thought, which has assumed its appropriate garments, either of words or actions; while Falsehood is thought, which, disguised in words or actions not its own, comes before the blind old world, as Jacob came before the patriarch Isaac, clothed in the goodly raiment of his brother Esau. And the world, like the patriarch, is often deceived; for, though the voice is Jacob's voice, yet the hands are the hands of Esau, and the False takes away the birth-right and the blessing²⁷ from the True. Hence it is, that ............