This, you will say, is a mere impression; it is no explanation, still less such an explanation as may afford a lesson. Not so. This strange inconclusiveness in all mediæval things, till the moment comes when they cease to be mediæval; this richness in germs and poverty in mature fruit, cannot be without its reason. And this reason, to my mind, lies in one word, the most terrible word of any, since it means suffering and hopelessness; a word which has haunted my mind ever since I have looked into mediæval things: the word Wastefulness. Wastefulness; the frightful characteristic of times at once so rich and so poor, the explanation of the long starvation and sickness that mankind, that all mankind's concerns--art, poetry, science, life--endured while the very things which would have fed and revived and nurtured, existed close at hand, and in profusion. Wastefulness, in this great period of confusion, of the most precious things that we possess: time, thought, and feeling refused to the realities of the world, and lavished on the figments of the imagination. Why this vagueness, this imperfection in all mediæval representations of life? Because even as men's eyes were withdrawn, by the temporal institutions of those days, from the sight of the fields and meadows which were left to the blind and dumb thing called serf; so also the thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions, were withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the mere earthly wrongs and woes of men by the great self-organized institution of mediæval religion. Pity of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel; love of God; study of the unknowable things of Heaven: such are the noblest employments of the mediæval soul; how much of pity, of love, may remain for man; how much of study for the knowable? To Wastefulness like this--to misapplication of mind ending almost in palsy--must we ascribe, I think, the strange sterility of such mediæval art as deals not merely with pattern, but with the reality of man's body and soul. And we might be thankful, if, during our wanderings among mediæval things, we had seen the starving of only art and artistic instincts; but the soul of man has lain starving also; starving for the knowledge which was sought only of Divine things, starving for the love which was given only to God.