What, stopping! and by the roadside, it seems; the day breaking, the atmosphere cold, steel-blue, and misty.  Rubbing the pane, a few surviving lights are seen twinkling—­a picture surely something Moslem.  For there, separated by low-lying fields, rise clustered Byzantine towers and belfries, with strangely-quaint German-looking spires of the Nuremberg pattern, but all dimly outlined and mysterious in their grayness.

There was an extraordinary and original feeling in this approach:  the old fortifications, or what remained of them, rising before me; the gloom, the mystery, the widening streak of day, and perfect solitariness.  As I admired the shadowy belfry which rose so supreme and asserted itself among the spires, there broke out of a sudden a perfect charivari of bells—­jangling, chiming, rioting, from various churches, while amid all was conspicuous the deep, solemn BOOM!  BOOM! like the slow baying of a hound.

It is five o’clock, but it might be the middle of the night, so dark is it.  This magic city, which seems like one of those in Albert Duerer’s cuts, rises at a distance as if within walls.  I stand in the roadside alone, deserted, the sole traveller set down.  The train has flown on into the night with a shriek.  The sleepy porter wonders, and looks at me askance.

As I take my way from the station and gradually approach the city—­for there is a broad stretch between it and the railway unfilled by houses—­I see the striking and impressive picture growing and enlarging.  The jangling and the solemn occasional boom still go on:  meant to give note that the day is opening.  Nothing more awe-inspiring or poetical can be conceived than this ‘cock-crow’ promenade.  Here are little portals suddenly opening on the stage, with muffled figures darting out, and worthy Belgians tripping from their houses—­betimes, indeed—­and hurrying away to mass.  Thus to make the acquaintance of that grandest and most astonishing of old cathedrals, is to do so under the best and most suitable conditions:  very different from the guide and cicerone business, which belongs to later hours of the day.  I stand in the open place, under its shadow, and lift my eyes with wonder to the amazing and crowded cluster of spires and towers:  its antique air, and even look of shattered dilapidation showing that the restorer has not been at his work.  There was no smugness or trimness, or spick-and-spanness, but an awful and reverent austerity.  And with an antique appropriateness to its functions the Flemish women, crones and maidens, all in their becoming cashmere hoods, and cloaks, and neat frills, still hurry on to the old Dom.  Near me rose the antique beffroi, from whose jaws still kept booming the old bell, with a fine clang, the same that had often pealed out to rouse the burghers to discord and tumult.  It pealed on, hoarse and even cracked, but persistently melodious, disregarding the contending clamours of its neighbours, just as some old baritone of the opera, reduced and broken down, will exhibit his ’phrasing’—­all that is left to him.  Quaint old burgher city, indeed, with the true flavour, though beshrew them for meddling with the fortifications!