Nathaniel Hawthorne

“ Paul's, sat down beneath the misty dome to rest ourselves. The muffled roar of the city, as we heard it there, is very soothing, and keeps one listening to it, somewhat as the flow of a river keeps us looking at it. It is a grand and quiet sound; and, ever and anon, a distant door slammed somewhere in the cathedral, and reverberated long and heavily, like the roll of thunder or the boom of cannon. Every noise that is loud enough to be heard in so vast an edifice melts into the great quietude. The interior looked very sombre, and the dome hung over us like a cloudy sky. ”

“ Thence we passed through the Cowgate, all the latter part of our drive being amongst the tall, quaint edifices of the old town, alike venerable and squalid. From the Grass-Market the rock of the castle looks more precipitous than as we had hitherto seen it, and its prisons, palaces, and barracks approach close to its headlong verge, and form one steep line with its descent. We drove quite round the Castle Hill, and returned down Prince's Street to our hotel. There can be no other city in the world that affords more splendid scenery, both natural and architectural, than Edinburgh. ”

“ At the beginning of this month I saw fruit-trees in blossom, stretched out flat against stone walls, reminding me of a dead bird nailed against the side of a barn. But it has been a backward and dreary spring; and I think Southport, in the course of it, has lost its advantage over the rest of the Liverpool neighborhood in point of milder atmosphere. The east-wind feels even rawer here than in the city.
Nevertheless, the columns, of the Southport Visitor begin to be well replenished with the names of guests, and the town is assuming its aspect of summer life. ”

“ Few men have done so much for their country as he. However, having no guide-book, we were none the wiser for what we saw out of the window of the rail-carriage; but, now and then, a castle appeared, on a commanding height, visible for miles round, and seemingly in good repair,—now, in some low and sheltered spot, the gray walls of an abbey; now, on a little eminence, the ruin of a border fortress, and near it the modern residence of the laird, with its trim lawn and shrubbery. ”

“ They are good for a people to rejoice with, and good also for a marriage, because through all their joy there is something solemn,—a tone of that voice which we have heard so often at funerals. It is good to see how everybody, up to this old age of the world, takes an interest in weddings, and seems to have a faith that now, at last, a couple have come together to make each other happy. The high, black, rough old cathedral tower sent out its chime of bells as earnestly as for any bridegroom and bride that came to be married five hundred years ago. ”

“ Passing through an apple-orchard, we were not long in reaching the Abbey, the ruins of which are much more extensive and more picturesque than those of Melrose, being overrun with bushes and shrubbery, and twined about with ivy, and all such vegetation as belongs, naturally, to old walls. There are the remains of the refectory, and other domestic parts of the Abbey, as well as the church, and all in delightful state of decay,—not so far gone but that we had bits of its former grandeur in the columns and broken arches, and in some portions of the edifice that still retain a roof. ”

“ If I had never seen the interior of York Cathedral, I should have been quite satisfied, no doubt, with the spaciousness of this nave and these side aisles, and the height of their arches, and the girth of these pillars; but with that recollection in my mind they fell a little short of grandeur. The interior is seen to disadvantage, and in a way the builder never meant it to be seen; because there is little or no painted glass, nor any such mystery as it makes, but only a colorless, common daylight, revealing everything without remorse. ”

“ This delightful walk terminates at an old bridge in the heart of the town; and the castle hangs immediately over its busiest street. On this bridge, last night, in the embrasure, or just over the pier, where there is a stone seat, I saw some old men seated, smoking their pipes and chatting. In my judgment, a river flowing through the centre of a town, and not too broad to make itself familiar, nor too swift, but idling along, as if it loved better to stay there than to go, is the pleasantest imaginable piece of scenery ”

“ London is evidenced in every one of them, just as a megatherium is in each of its separate bones, even if they be small ones. Thus I never fail of a sort of self-congratulation in finding myself, for instance, passing along Ludgate Hill; but, in spite of this, it is really an ungladdened life to wander through these huge, thronged ways, over a pavement foul with mud, ground into it by a million of footsteps; jostling against people who do not seem to be individuals, but all one mass, so homogeneous is the street-walking aspect of them ”

“ In America, on a hot summer's day, how delightful its cool and solemn depths would be! The painted windows, too, were evidently contrived, in the first instance, by persons who saw how effective they would prove when a vivid sun shone through them. But in England, the interior of a cathedral, nine days out of ten, is a vast sullenness, and as chill as death and the tomb. At any rate, it was so to-day, and so thought one of the old vergers, who kept walking as briskly as he could along the width of the transepts. ”

“ June 21st.—Southport, I presume, is now in its most vivid aspect; there being a multitude of visitors here, principally of the middling classes, and a frequent crowd, whom I take to be working-people from Manchester and other factory towns. It is the strangest place to come to for the pleasures of the sea, of which we scarcely have a glimpse from month's end to mouth's end, nor any fresh, exhilarating breath from it, but a lazy, languid atmosphere, brooding over the waste of sands; or even if there be a sulky and bitter wind blowing along the promenade, it still brings no salt elixir. ”

“ My wife sat down to draw the font, and I walked through the Lady Chapel meanwhile, pausing over the empty bed of Queen Mary, and the grave of Queen Catharine, and looking at the rich and sumptuous roof, where a fountain, as it were, of groins of arches spouts from numberless pilasters, intersecting one another in glorious intricacy. Under the central tower, opening to either transept, to the nave, and to the choir, are four majestic arches, which I think must equal in height those of which I saw the ruins, and one, all but perfect, at Furness Abbey. They are about eighty feet high. ”

“ Salisbury Cathedral is far more beautiful than that of York, the exterior of which was really disagreeable to my eye; but this mighty spire and these multitudinous gray pinnacles and towers ascend towards heaven with a kind of natural beauty, not as if man had contrived them. They might be fancied to have grown up, just as the spires of a tuft of grass do, at the same time that they have a law of propriety and regularity among themselves. The tall spire is of such admirable proportion that it does not seem gigantic ”

“ One of these was the height on which stands Stirling Castle, and which reclines on the plain like a hound or a lion or a sphinx, holding the castle on the highest part, where its head should be. A mile or two distant from this picturesque hill rises another, still more striking, called the Abbey Craig, on which is a ruin, and where is to be built the monument to William Wallace. I cannot conceive a nobler or more fitting pedestal. The sullenness of the day had vanished, the air was cool but invigorating, and the cloud scenery was as fine as that below it. ”

“ August 24th.—Day before yesterday I took the rail for Southport,—a cool, generally overcast day, with glimmers of faint sunshine. The ride is through a most uninteresting tract of country, at first, glimpses of the river, with the thousands of masts in the docks; the dismal outskirts of a great town, still spreading onward, with beginnings of streets, and insulated brick buildings and blocks; farther on, a wide monotony of level plain, and here and there a village and a church; almost always a windmill in sight, there being plenty of breeze to turn its vans on this windy coast. ”

“ When we reached the spot, we found a picnic-party just finishing their dinner, on one of the overthrown stones of the druidical temple; and within the sacred circle an artist was painting a wretched daub of the scene, and an old shepherd —the very Shepherd of Salisbury Plain sat erect in the centre of the ruin.
There never was a ruder thing than Stonehenge made by mortal hands. It is so very rude that it seems as if Nature and man had worked upon it with one consent, and so it is all the stranger and more impressive from its rudeness. ”

“ Except in some of the old colleges of Oxford, I have not seen any other place that impressed me in this way; and the grounds of Peterborough Cathedral have the advantage over even the Oxford colleges, insomuch that the life is here domestic,—that of the family, that of the affections,—a natural life, which one deludes himself with imagining may be made into something sweeter and purer in this beautiful spot than anywhere else. Doubtless the inhabitants find it a stupid and tiresome place enough, and get morbid and sulky, and heavy and obtuse of head and heart, with the monotony of their life. ”

“ Still I was comfortable enough in a thick Skye Tweed, and waited patiently till the rain abated; then took my way homeward, and admired the pass of the Trosachs more than when I first traversed it. If it has a fault, it is one that few scenes in Great Britain share with it,—that is, the trees and shrubbery, with which the precipices are shagged, conceal them a little too much. A crag, streaked with black and white, here and there shows its head aloft, or its whole height from base to summit, and suggests that more of such sublimity is bidden than revealed. ”

“ Nothing else in London is so like the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these archways, and find yourself transported from the jumble, mob, tumult, uproar, as of an age of week-days condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal sabbath. Thence we went into Staple Inn, I think it was,—which has a front upon Holborn of four or five ancient gables in a row, and a low arch under the impending story, admitting you into a paved quadrangle, beyond which you have the vista of another. ”

“ The pavement is elaborately ornamented; the ceiling is to be brilliantly gilded and painted, as it was of yore, and the tracery and sculptures around the walls are to be faithfully renewed from what remains of the original patterns.
After viewing the chapter-house, the verger—an elderly man of grave, benign manner, clad in black and talking of the cathedral and the monuments as if he loved them—led us again into the nave of the cathedral, and thence within the screen of the choir. The screen is as poor as possible,—mere barren wood-work, without the least attempt at beauty. ”

“ The castle is not at all crumbly, but in excellent repair, though so venerable. There are rooks cawing about the shapeless patches of their nests, in the tops of the trees. In the castle wall, as well as in the round towers of the gateway, there seem to be little tenements, perhaps inhabited by the servants and dependants of the family. They looked in very good order, with tokens of present domesticity about them. The whole of this old castle, indeed, was as neat as a new, small dwelling, in spite of an inevitable musty odor of antiquity. ”

“ So heavy was the gloom, that gas was lighted in all the shop-windows; and the little charcoal-furnaces of the women and boys, roasting chestnuts, threw a ruddy, misty glow around them. And yet I liked it. This fog seems an atmosphere proper to huge, grimy London; as proper to London as that light neither of the sun nor moon is to the New Jerusalem.
On reaching home, I found the same fog diffused through the drawing-room, though how it could have got in is a mystery. Since nightfall, however, the atmosphere is clear again. ”