The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 311 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 311 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861.
are the graves of those whose names the world has not known.  This view, (302,) from above Rydal Mount, is so Claude-like, especially in its trees, that one wants the solemn testimony of the double-picture to believe it an actual transcript of Nature.  Of the other English landscapes we have seen, one of the most pleasing on the whole is that marked 43,—­Sweden Bridge, near Ambleside.  But do not fail to notice St. Mary’s Church (101) in the same mountain-village.  It grows out of the ground like a crystal, with spur-like gables budding out all the way up its spire, as if they were ready to flower into pinnacles, like such as have sprung up all over the marble multiflora of Milan.

[Footnote A:  Miss Martineau, who went to his funeral, and may be supposed to describe after a visit to the churchyard, gives the inscription incorrectly.  See Atlantic Monthly for May, 1861, p. 552.  Tourists cannot be trusted; stereographs can.]

And as we have been looking at a steeple, let us flit away for a moment and pay our reverence at the foot of the tallest spire in England,—­that of Salisbury Cathedral.  Here we see it from below, looking up,—­one of the most striking pictures ever taken.  Look well at it; Chichester has just fallen, and this is a good deal like it,—­some have thought raised by the same builder.  It has bent somewhat (as you may see in these other views) from the perpendicular; and though it has been strengthened with clamps and framework, it must crash some day or other, for there has been a great giant tugging at it day and night for five hundred years, and it will at last shut up into itself or topple over with a sound and thrill that will make the dead knights and bishops shake on their stone couches, and be remembered all their days by year-old children.  This is the first cathedral we ever saw, and none ever so impressed us since.  Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five- or six-foot personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with the little life of the day in its little dwellings.  In the Alps your voice is as the piping of a cricket.  Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your heart seems to trivial a movement to take reckoning of.  In the buttressed hollow of one of these palaeozoic cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which your breathing structure reposes.  Before we leave Salisbury, let us look for a moment into its cloisters.  A green court-yard, with a covered gallery on its level, opening upon it through a series of Gothic arches.  You may learn more, young American, of the difference between your civilization and that of the Old World by one look at this than from an average lyceum-lecture an hour long.  Seventy years of life means a great deal to you; how little, comparatively, to the dweller in these cloisters!  You will have seen a city grow up about you, perhaps; your whole world will have been changed half a dozen times over.  What change for him?  The cloisters are just as when he entered them,—­just as they were a hundred years ago,—­just as they will be a hundred years hence.

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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.