ABSTRACT
Henry Adams had made something of his visits to certain buildings in France. In the summer of 1902—in a house of H Street, at a castle in the Scottish Highlands, in a hotel in Paris—he wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Its appearance in print was long delayed. Yet the way Mr. Adams pushed one on imperiously, showed one the sights, made one see and understand, and even take part in these scenes of the past, made it easier to follow than to give up. Pride, humility, love, hate—all the intermingled qualities of his resurrected poets, thinkers, sinners, and saints—were recreated in his pages. And an extra element, an urgency mixed with an unalterable sadness, was present too. Adams made one know the mood of the beginning and the end, and the mood which held together, for a moment, the conflicting energies of that time’s people.
