Hiram's Hospital, as the retreat is called, is a picturesque building enough, and shows the correct taste with which the ecclesiastical architects of those days were imbued. It stands on the banks of the little river, which flows nearly round the cathedral close, being on the side furthest from the town. The London road crosses the river by a pretty one-arched bridge, and looking from this bridge, the stranger will see the windows of the old men's rooms, each pair of windows separated by a small buttress. A broad gravel walk runs between the building and the river, which is always trim and cared for; and at the end of the walk, under the parapet of the approach to the bridge, is a large and well-worn seat, on which, in mild weather three or four of Hiram's bedesmen are sure to be seen seated. Beyond this row of buttresses, and further from the bridge and also further from the water which here suddenly bends, are the pretty oriel windows of Mr. Harding's house, and his well mown lawn. The entrance to the hospital is from the London road and is made through a ponderous gateway under a heavy stone arch, unnecessary, one would suppose, at any time, for the protection of twelve old men, but greatly conducive to the good appearance of Hiram's charity. On passing through this portal, never closed to any one from six a.m. till ten p.m., and never open afterwards, except on application to a huge, intricately hung mediæval bell, the handle of which no un-initiated intruder can possibly find, the six doors of the old men's abodes are seen, and beyond them is a slight iron screen, through which the more happy portion of the Barchester élite pass into the Elysium of Mr. Harding's dwelling.
He who loves immense space, cloud shadows sailing over purple slopes, island gardens, distant glimpses of snow-capped mountains, breadth, air, immensity, and flooding sunlight, will choose Maggiore. But scarcely has he cast his vote for this, the Juno of the divine rivals, when he remembers the triple lovelinesses of the Larian Aphrodite, disclosed in all their placid grace from Villa Serbelloni;—the green blue of the waters, clear as glass, opaque through depth; the millefleurs roses clambering into cypresses by Cadenabbia; the laburnums hanging their yellow clusters from the clefts of Sasso Rancio; the oleander arcades of Varenna; the wild white limestone crags of San Martino, which he has climbed to feast his eyes with the perspective, magical, serene, Leonardesquely perfect, of the distant gates of Adda. Then while this modern Paris is yet doubting, perhaps a thought may cross his mind of sterner solitary Lake Iseo—the Pallas of the three. She offers her own attractions. The sublimity of Monte Adamello, dominating Lovere and all the lowland like Hesiod's hill of Virtue reared aloft above the plain of common life, has charms to tempt heroic lovers.
The painter may transfer its campanile, glittering like dragon's scales, to his canvas. The lover of the picturesque will wander through its aisle at mass-time, watching the sunlight play upon those upturned Southern faces with their ardent eyes; and happy is he who sees young men and maidens on Whit Sunday crowding round the chancel rails, to catch the marigolds and gillyflowers scattered from baskets which the priest has blessed.
The changes of scene upon this tiny square are so frequent as to remind one of a theatre. Looking down from the inn-balcony, between the glazy green pots gay with scarlet amaryllis-bloom, we are inclined to fancy that the whole has been prepared for our amusement. In the morning the cover for the macaroni-flour, after being washed, is spread out on the bricks to dry. In the afternoon the fishermen bring their nets for the same purpose. In the evening the city magnates promenade and whisper. Dark-eyed women, with orange or crimson kerchiefs for headgear, cross and re-cross, bearing baskets on their shoulders. Great lazy large limbed fellows, girt with scarlet sashes and finished off with dark blue night-caps (for a contrast to their saffron-colored shirts, white breeches and sunburnt calves), slouch about or sleep face downwards on the parapets.
How the hand of Time has mellowed the ruddy brick and the marble's whiteness until ivory and rose blend and are in harmony with those stained and faded frescoes which still remain in the panels of the upper walls. Columns of veined marble stand in ranks on either side of the entrance. They are mounted on the backs of stiff-maned lions. Fit supporters are these for the arches of the Sanctuary as, at its very door, with claw and tooth they tear to pieces the bestial forms of vice and ignorance. Above rise the moulded archivolts, tier on tier, clothed with vine and tendril and peopled with bird and beast. These may be uncouth in form, but the rude hands that fashioned them learned their lesson at the feet of Nature. What there is of convention in arrangement or in pattern has flowed hither through the East from the original fountains of Greece and Rome but now at last all moves in freedom and without restraint. As in the short nights of the North sunrise follows fast upon the setting of the sun, so here though we see in this work the sunset of the Antique yet it is already aglow with light from the coming dawn of Mediæval Art.
Florence is more noisy; indeed, I think it the noisiest town I was ever in. What with the continual jangling of its bells, the rattle of Austrian drums, and the street cries, Ancora mi raccapriccio. The Italians are a vociferous people, and most so among them the Florentines. Walking through a back street one day, I saw an old woman higgling with a peripatetic dealer, who, at every interval afforded him by the remarks of his veteran antagonist, would tip his head on one side, and shout, with a kind of wondering enthusiasm, as if he could hardly trust the evidence of his own senses to such loveliness, O, che bellezza! che belle-e-ezza! The two had been contending as obstinately as the Greeks and Trojans over the body of Patroclus, and I was curious to know what was the object of so much desire on the one side and admiration on the other. It was a half dozen of weazeny baked pears, beggarly remnant of the day's traffic.... It never struck me before what a quiet people Americans are.
The semi-dome of the eastern apse above the high altar is entirely filled with a gigantic half-length figure of Christ. He raises His right hand to bless and with His left holds an open book on which is written in Greek and Latin, "I am the Light of the world." ... Below him on a smaller scale are ranged the archangels and the mother of the Lord, who holds the child upon her knees. Thus Christ appears twice upon this wall, once as the Omnipotent Wisdom, the Word by whom all things were made, and once as God deigning to assume a shape of flesh and dwell with men. The magnificent image of supreme Deity seems to fill with a single influence and to dominate the whole building. The house with all its glory is his. He dwells there like Pallas in her Parthenon or Zeus in his Olympian temple. To left and right over every square inch of the cathedral blaze mosaics, which portray the story of God's dealings with the human race from the Creation downwards, together with those angelic beings and saints who symbolize each in his own degree some special virtue granted to mankind. The walls of the fane are therefore an open book of history, theology and ethics for all men to read.
Truly everything here has a dramatic character. The smallness and grace of this little church gleaming with colour, its chapels and grottoes like a spiritual vision, such as I have never found elsewhere in the whole field of religious conception. It is an illustrated picture-book of poetical legends, which are bloodless and painless, though fantastic, like the lives of pious anchorites in the wilderness, and amid the birds of the field. Here Religion treads on the borders of fairy-land, and brings an indescribable atmosphere away from thence.
It is a drowsy little Burgundian town, very old and ripe, with crooked streets, vistas always oblique, and steep moss-covered roofs.... I carried away from Beaune the impression of something autumnal,—something rusty yet kindly, like the taste of a sweet russet pear.
At Le Mans as at Bourges, my first business was with the cathedral, to which I lost no time in directing my steps.... It stands on the edge of the eminence of the town, which falls straight away on two sides of it, and makes a striking mass, bristling behind, as you see it from below, with rather small but singularly numerous flying buttresses. On my way to it I happened to walk through the one street which contains a few ancient and curious houses,—a very crooked and untidy lane, of really mediæval aspect, honored with the denomination of the Grand Rue. Here is the house of Queen Berengaria.... The structure in question—very sketchable, if the sketcher could get far enough away from it—is an elaborate little dusky façade, overhanging the street, ornamented with panels of stone, which are covered with delicate Renaissance sculpture. A fat old woman, standing in the door of a small grocer's shop next to it,—a most gracious old woman, with a bristling moustache and a charming manner,—told me what the house was.
This admirable house, in the centre of the town, gabled, elaborately timbered, and much restored, is a really imposing monument. The basement is occupied by a linen-draper, who flourishes under the auspicious sign of the Mère de Famille; and above her shop the tall front rises in five overhanging stories. As the house occupies the angle of a little place, the front is double, and carved and interlaced, has a high picturesqueness. The Maison d'Adam is quite in the grand style, and I am sorry to say I failed to learn what history attaches to its name.
I remember going around to the church, after I had left the good sisters, and to a little quiet terrace, which stands in front of it, ornamented with a few small trees and bordered with a wall, breast high, over which you look down steep hillsides, off into the air, and all about the neighboring country. I remember saying to myself that this little terrace was one of those felicitous nooks which the tourist of taste keeps in his mind as a picture.
They wake you early in this hilly town. It was hardly light this morning when up and down through all its highways went a vigorous drum beat. Reluctantly peeking from the window to see the troops enter our square I was disappointed to find that one regimental drummer, marching unaccompanied and lonely, had done all this mischief. What useful purpose did he serve? After a brief respite and repose the noise of another commotion came in with the morning air; a murmur which grew and became a chatter and at last a din! The next journey to the window showed that the morning market was in full swing. Piles of fresh greens and rich-colored vegetables were tended by gnarled old peasant women sitting under widespread umbrellas of faded colors. But what a pleasant air it was that came through the opened sash; a mountain air with just that faint flavor of garlic tinging it which presages something satisfying to be found later. Strengthened for a time by our coffee and rolls we wandered through these winding streets. We saw the weather-beaten, leaden flèche of the cathedral high on the hill, but for the time were satisfied to study the many ancient houses which still remain. Their fronts framed in dark oak with a filling of amber-colored plaster topple over the public ways until they almost meet. Here and there the oak beams are carved, and grinning man or snarling monster regards you from corbel or boss. In places too there are bits of old Gothic detail and one doorway of true Flamboyant work. There is the true poetry of architecture! In England the Decorated Period gives you what is handsome, the Perpendicular what is stately. In France the cathedrals of Paris and of Rheims are splendidly serious and correct; but if in Gothic work you seek imaginative, unrestrained, carelessly free poetry it is to be found in the flowing lines and exuberant fancy of the work of the Flamboyant period.
We found much needed restoration in the hors-d'œuvres, the omelette, the cutlet, the salads and the cheese of déjeuner,—and then followed coffee under the awning of the café. Here we looked out on the Grand Place which had now become sleepy, all signs of the market and its business having disappeared. On it front the Mairie, the Bureau des Postes, the Hôtel du Lion d'Or and various centres of local commerce. We watched our neighbors in the café; the colonel with clanking sword in vigorous discussion with a local magnate; the retired bourgeois who played a desultory game of billiards or a deeply thought out match at dominoes. A quiet square it was now, and, in the shade of its plane trees, comfortable and at peace with the world, we fell asleep and made up for the wakefulness of our earlier hours.
All day the sky had been banked with thunderclouds, but by the time we reached Chartres, toward four o'clock, they had rolled away under the horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that to pass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of a church in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible: we were in a hollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gathered themselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out of them great sheets and showers of color. Framed by such depths of darkness, and steeped in a blaze of mid-summer sun, the familiar windows seemed singularly remote and yet overpoweringly vivid. Now they widened into dark-shored pools splashed with sunset, now glittered and menaced like the shields of fighting angels. Some were cataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint's tunic, others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, others the sails of galleons bound for the Purple Islands; and in the western wall the scattered fires of the rose window hung like a constellation in an African night. When one dropped one's eyes from these ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, all veiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar lights, seemed to symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavy distances and its little islands of illusions. All that a great cathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all the tranquillizing power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richness of detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty, the cathedral of Chartres gave us in that perfect hour.
All else for which the builders sacrificed, has passed away—all their living interests, and aims, and achievements. We know not for what they labored, and we see no evidence of their reward. Victory, wealth, authority, happiness—all have departed, though bought by many a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their life and their toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honors, and their errors; but they have left us their adoration.
We spent yesterday in the Forêt de C——. As the Emperor had guests we were not admitted at the Château, but we tramped for long through the woods. The grassy roads run beneath the embowering beeches straight from carrefour to carrefour. The gnarled and twisted trunks give to each tree a personal character and make it a master-piece of Nature. Of a sudden we came on the Imperial hunt winding in gay procession through the forest to its rendezvous. Hunting horns in triple rings of brass encircled the leading horsemen. From time to time we heard from them the familiar strains which echo through the Latin Quarter at Mi-Carême. Then followed in brilliant liveries a troop of lackeys, grooms, and other servants, and the pack of staghounds held in leash but sniffing and yelping. Next came the hunters themselves on high-bred mounts and in court costumes of ancient design. Lastly there were barouches and landaus carrying the ladies of the Court "en grande tenue." The sunlight flickering through the beech branches enlivened this brilliant train as it wound through the forest glades and disappeared down a green allée.
We had continued our walk for scarce a mile when, but a short distance from us, a stag crossed our path—stood startled—with head erect,—and then with confident leaps vanished in the forest just as the distant hounds became aware of him and joined in a wild chorus. In a few moments the pack came in a rush across our path. Up the different allées rode the horsemen in haste—asking of us news of the stag. We on foot joined in the pursuit,—but at last the forest swallowed one after the other, stag, and hounds, and hunters, and the sound of dog and horn.