The nocturnal world: Mapping the living cathedral versus the city of tombs

“ Once the otter, attracted by scent or sound, or both, half rose out of the moat and looked over the low bank; but the moment she saw that the intruders were only a badger and two cubs she fell again to her romps. Later she looked up and scrutinized the strange object at the window. The squire remained as motionless as the gargoyles; her suspicion was allayed, and once more she resumed her frolics. Anon the trio stole away and, passing through the drain beneath the park wall by which the badgers had found an entrance, gained the valley where the weary hounds lay asleep in their kennels. ”

“ Or you drive by a little creek where there are bushes and hear the bird, called by the steppe dwellers “the sleeper,” call “Asleep, asleep, asleep!” while another laughs or breaks into trills of hysterical weeping—that is the owl. For whom do they call and who hears them on that plain, God only knows, but there is deep sadness and lamentation in their cry. . . . There is a scent of hay and dry grass and belated flowers, but the scent is heavy, sweetly mawkish and soft.
Everything can be seen through the mist, but it is hard to make out the colours and the outlines of objects. ”

“ How at evening the setting sun glows through their black shafts; how ethereal the light that then fills the spaces of the wood; how the stars look down through the branches in the living stillness of the night! ”

“ As I wakens from my restless sleep here in my bed o’ mud,
’N’ I pull my blankets tighter underneath my shelter fly,
An’ I listen to the thunder o’ the trucks a-rollin’ by.
They’re jumpin’ an’ they’re humpin’ through the inky gloom o’ night,
’N’ I wonder how them drivers see without a glim o’ light;
I c’n hear the clutches roarin’ as they throw the gears in high,
An’ the radiators boilin’ as the trucks go rollin’ by.
There’s some a-draggin’ cannons, you c’n spot the sound all right—
The rumblin’ ones is heavies, an’ the rattly ones is light ”

“ But a city is a dreary place at night, even to one who knows his way in it—much drearier to one lost—in some respects drearier than a heath—except there be old mine-shafts in it.
“It’s as gien a’ the birds o’ a country had creepit intil their bit eggs again, an’ the day was left bare o’ sang!” said the poet to himself as he walked. Night amongst houses was a new thing to him. Night on the hillsides and in the fields he knew well; but this was like a place of tombs—what else, when all were dead for the night? The night is the world’s graveyard, and the cities are its catacombs. ”

“ The most amazing cathedral constructed by Nature herself, with lavish outlay of the pointed aisle of branches, is at Jumièges. There, close to the splendid ruins of the Abbey, where the two towers are still intact, while the roofless nave, carpeted with flowers, ends in a chancel of foliage shut in by an apse of trees, three vast aisles of centenary boles extend in parallel lines ”

“ Mountains, and rivers, and mighty woods, the cathedrals of nature—these will have their part in his pictures; but their colouring and shadows will not be wholly the gift of rising or departing suns, nor of the night with all her stars; it will be a varying suffusion from the life within, from the glowing clouds of thought and feeling, which mantle with their changeful drapery all external creation.
—————"We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live." ”

“ Calixtus, but were just as the martyrs left them; and, as I do not remember to have read anywhere that they are formed merely of long, low, narrow, wandering underground passages, lined on either side with tombs in tiers like berths on a steamer, and expanding here and there into small square chambers, bearing the traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as chapels,—I venture to offer the information here. The reader is to keep in his mind a darkness broken by the light of wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or he cannot realize the catacombs as they are in fact. ”

“ Coming out from the dark passages of the Catacombs of St. Callixtus, in the clear twilight of a winter's evening, one sees rising against the red glow of the sky the broken masses of the ancient tombs. One city of the dead lies beneath the feet, another stretches before the eyes far out of sight. The crowded history of Rome is condensed into one mighty spectacle. The ambitions, the hates, the valor, the passions, the religions, the life and death of a thousand years are there ”

“ In the highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens
Quiet eyes;
Where essential silence cheers and blesses,
And for ever in the hill-recesses
Her more lovely music
Broods and dies. ”

“ Others may delight in communing with solitary nature, and may rave in rhyme about the glories of woods, lakes, mountains, and Ausonian skies; but what is all that compared to the awakening of a great city to the life of day? What are the floods of golden light that every morning bathe the mountain tops, and are poured down into the valleys and fields below, compared to the playing of the sunbeams in the smoke from ten thousand chimneys, and the din of toil displacing the silence of night? ”

“ Nature with all her children haunts the hill.
The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet
Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit ⁠530
Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance
Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;
The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight
Before our gate, and the slow, silent night
Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep. ⁠535
Be this our home in life, and when years heap
Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay,
Let us become the overhanging day,
The living soul of this Elysian isle,
Conscious, inseparable, one. ”

“ More tenderness is enkindled than ceiling and walls of house ever saw, tenderness of a certain sheltering care which it is luxurious to give.
Night is dark and still and intense, and you can hear two hearts beating while you look outward and upward, and dimly discern the passage of bats’ wings in the air. ”

“ If all is well the Badger emerges, perhaps followed by the cubs; and they follow the well-worn tracks that their feet have hardened, and hunt for food. St. John says: "Eggs are his delight, and a partridge's nest with seventeen or eighteen eggs must afford him a fine meal, particularly if he can surprise and kill the hen-bird also; snails and worms which he finds above ground during his nocturnal rambles are likewise included in his bill of fare." ”

“ But Mother Badger had no mind to fight for fighting's sake. Had she not feared for her cubs, she would have fled at once from a creature who could summon that hot, bright mystery at will. She withdrew cautiously in her tracks, and one by one her cubs followed her from rock or heather tuft where each lay. Once in the darkness, beyond the reek of whisky and the dreaded voice of man, they breathed more freely; and they bumped along in single file down to the beech and bramble woods which lie by the Hollow Field, and which from bud-time to leaf-fall are seldom visited by men. ”

“ Then a light springs out of the void, another and another, quickly yet so gradually as to seem part of nature’s processes, until at length all the city and its suburban beach towns, the very warships in the harbor, are outlined in twinkling lights—for each and all of them do distinctly twinkle—like sparkling gems of some fantastically shaped garment of dark-blue stuff, of which nothing else is seen but the dim jagged silhouette of the mountain background, whence blows the caressing air of evening.... ”

“ Fragrance, exhaled from rose and citron bower,
Blends with the dewy freshness of the hour;
Hush’d are the winds, and nature seems to sleep
In light and stillness; wood, and tower, and steep,
Are dyed with tints of glory, only given
To the rich evening of a southern heaven—
Tints of the sun, whose bright farewell is fraught
With all that art hath dreamt, but never caught
—Yes, Nature sleeps; but not with her at rest
The fiery passions of the human breast,
Hark! from th’ Alhambra’s towers what stormy sound,
Each moment deepening, wildly swells around? ”

“ Those of Notre Dame de Paris are thick-set and gloomy, almost elephantine; cleft almost from top to bottom by deep bays, they seem to mount slowly and with difficulty, and stop short, crushed as it were by the burden of sins, dragged down to earth by the wickedness of the city; we feel the effort with which they rise, and we are saddened as we contemplate those captive masses, all the more depressing by reason of the dismal hue of the louvre-boards. ”

“ You have only to look from a distance at any old-fashioned Cathedral-city and you will see in a moment the mediæval relations between Church and State. The Cathedral is the city. The first object you catch sight of as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers holding possession of the centre of the landscape—majestically beautiful—imposing by mere size. As you go nearer, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down below among the streets and lanes twilight is darkening. ”

“ The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death's dominion.
But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays. ”

“ At places in cathedral premises are charnel houses, or rooms where are deposited bones and remains exhumed, or taken from tombs, and these are thrown into promiscuous heaps to moulder on a little longer, and, having become resolved back to mother earth, to be quietly shovelled out as food for grass and flowers on the great lawns. These are the seen, the temporal; but the unseen, the eternal, is no less fact, nor less real, for the influence these men exerted lives and acts. The mortal is greater than any material thing he builds. ”

“ In what profusion are the antique slabs, with their great brass crosses. How the very atmosphere of the place is fragrant with the memory of the sainted dead! In visiting these cathedrals, in looking on the ruins of ancient abbey or monastery,—so complete in themselves, and exhibiting such evidence of former grandeur,—one is inclined to feel that each is the cathedral of all England,—the Mecca of all the Church; for what is lacking? Not capacity or costliness; not lack of graves of kings, earls, barons, or lords, for here beneath our feet repose the dust of enough such for an entire kingdom. ”

“ Its cathedrals are filled with monuments and tombs, which recall great names and sacred memories. Is it mere imagination, that when I enter one of these old piles and sit in some quiet alcove, the place is filled to my ear with airy tongues, voices of the dead, that come from the tablets around and from the tombs beneath; that whisper along the aisles, and rise and float away in the arches above, bearing the soul to heaven—spirits with which my own poor heart, as I sit and pray, seems in peaceful and blessed communion? ”

“ I walked slowly amongst the tombs, and tried to decipher the inscriptions. The dead are of various nations,—English, American, but principally German. Sometimes a cluster of cypresses shadowed the tomb—sometimes a fair flowering shrub had twined around it. The epitaphs were written with elegance always; at times with the deepest tenderness and beauty. Each had his short history, each his melancholy interest and adventure. Here was the man of science and literature, who came to lay down his head, after a painful and varied pilgrimage, in this City of the Soul. ”

“ Houses built, decorated, and furnished for the dead. In which, however, the dead were not dead; but were living in the mummied state. We have rock-tombs elsewhere; but where, out of Egypt, could we find [141] another such city? It is a city excavated in the rocky plain, and in the mountain valleys. It consists of thousands of apartments, spacious halls, long galleries, steps ascending and descending, and chambers innumerable. It is more extensive, more costly, more decorated, than many a famous city on which the sun shines. It is peopled everywhere with its own inhabitants ”

“ Night is not wholly the Galilean God's; He shares its dominion with the devils. As the shades of night descended from the hills, Fauns and Faun-women, Nymphs and Pans, came huddling beneath the shelter of the tombs along the roadside, and there under the kindly empire of the infernal powers would enjoy a brief repose. ”

“ The works of man pierced that serenest sky
With tombs, and towers, and fanes, 'twas her delight
To wander in the shadow of the night. 520
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With motion like the spirit of that wind
Whose soft step deepens slumber, her light feet
Passed through the peopled haunts of humankind,
Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet,
Through fane, and palace-court, and labyrinth mined 525
With many a dark and subterranean street
Under the Nile, through chambers high and deep
She passed, observing mortals in their sleep. ”