Elmhurst

“ It was a peculiar writing, and a very characteristic one; not easy to read until one grew accustomed to it. But at the end of a few minutes I had mastered it. The provisions of the will were simple: Elmhurst and the sum of one million dollars in negotiable securities were left absolutely to "my dear and revered Master, Francisco Silva, Priest of the Third Circle of Siva, and Yogi of the Ninth Degree, to whom I owe my soul's salvation," the bequest to be used for the purpose of founding a monastery for the study of the doctrines of Saivaism, and as an asylum for all true believers. ”

“ Small wonder that crowding the Oldenhurst retainers gradually into smaller space, with occasional Sabbath glimpses of the living rulers of Oldenhurst already in railed-off exaltation, it had forced them to accept Oldenhurst as a synonym of eternity, and left the knowledge of a higher Power to what time they should be turned out to their longer sleep under the tender grass of the beautiful outer churchyard. ”

“ You never please yourself."
"Well, Sarah," replied Philip, good-naturedly, "this is the way of it. The church in Elmdale is in a University town. The atmosphere of the place is scholastic. You know I passed four years of student life there. With the exception of the schools, there are not a thousand people in the village, a quiet, sleepy, dull, retired, studious place. I love the memory of it. I could go there as the pastor of the Elmdale church and preach to an audience of college boys eight months in the year and to about eighty refined, scholarly people the rest of the time. ”

“ ELMIRA, a city of the United States, capital of Chemung county New York, is situated in a fertile valley on the Chemung river, and on the Erie and Northern Central railroads, 274 miles W.N.W. of New York. By the Chemung Canal it is connected with Seneca Lake, 20 miles distant, and by the Junction Canal with the interior of Pennsylvania. Its principal buildings are the fine courthouse, the female college, attended by about 120 students, the high and normal schools, and the free academy. ”

“ There must actually be sufficient inhabitants in the parish to quarter fill the building! Newchurch makes a pretty picture, thoroughly characteristic of the marsh. From it the eye ranges to the wooded cliffs at Bilsington, to Aldington Knoll, and to Lympne, with its castle and church, looking fairy-like and ethereal in the shimmering light of a summer afternoon; or in the other direction to where the marsh is bounded by the sea. The picture of Newchurch itself is seen here, and is more eloquent than mere words can be. ”

“ The site of the castle is occupied by pleasure gardens, commanding an extensive view from high ground. The town hall contains a library and a natural history collection. The college is a large boys’ school. The town is an important agricultural centre. Ellesmere canal, a famous work of Thomas Telford, connects the Severn with the Mersey, crossing the Vale of Llangollen by an immense aqueduct, 336 yds. ”

“ We were to publish a directory of the city of Elmira. How we came to select that city I have forgotten, but the upshot of that latest of my business ventures I am not likely to forget soon. Our plan was to boom the advertising end of the enterprise by a nightly street display in the interest of our patrons. We had barely got into town when the railroad strikes of that memorable summer reached Elmira. There had been dreadful trouble, fire and bloodshed, in Pennsylvania, and the citizens took steps at once to preserve the peace. ”

“ From Gotha we went to Erfurt, where we only spent one night, in order to see the Cathedral. Erfurt is an Undine of a place, full of running streams and bridges and mills roaring all about you. I saw one street with a brook rippling down the very middle of it at a most rattling pace, and at every little distance two or three stepping stones by which to cross it. Just think how fascinating for children! I longed to stay and have a good play there myself. The Erfurt Cathedral is much smaller than those of Spire and Cologne, but the exterior is wonderfully beautiful. ”

“ M. has gone off to leave ours at Captain Hall's door, and then he will leave his card at ours, and there the matter will end.
We have been walking over the town, over the ramparts, and through some fine gravelled avenues shaded with elms. Don't fancy our elms, with their drooping embowering branches—no, nothing so beautiful—but what we call the English elm, with its upright, stiff stem. ”

“ In 1061 an obscure widow, inhabiting a small village on the wild and tempestuous coast of Norfolk, by erecting a little chapel resembling that at Nazareth, where the Virgin was saluted by the angel Gabriel, was able to impart a renown to that village which extended to all England. Erasmus thus described it in his time: “Not far from the sea, about four miles, there standeth a town living almost on nothing else but upon the resort of pilgrims. There is a college of canons there, supported by their offerings. ”

“ This new church was dedicated to ‘St. Ethelbert and the Blessed Virgin,’ and into it, when it was finished, the Bishop’s chair was carried.
For, although the young King could not be called a martyr, he certainly left the record of a pure and brave and noble life behind him, and it seemed fitting—and we are glad that it did so—that the memory of his name should linger, all down the ages, round the stately Cathedral which was built as an expiation of his death, and in which, for half a century at least, his body rested. ”

“ August 23.—I never grow weary of the endless charm of English parish churches. The more one sees of them the more one realises what fresh, delightful surprises they hold. Nothing else in England betrays so well the curious individuality, the fascinating tendency to incipient eccentricity, which marks the English genius. Certainly there are few English churches one can place beside some of the more noble and exquisitely beautiful French churches, such a church, for instance, as that of Caudebec on the Seine. ”

“ By birth he was a Saxon, but in all else he was a foreigner. Accordingly the Church at Westminster was a wide-sweeping innovation on all that had been seen before. [pg 45] 'Destroying the old building,' he says in his charter, 'I have built up a new one from the very foundation.' Its fame as a 'new style of composition' lingered in the minds of men for generations. It was the first cruciform church in England, from which all the rest of like shape were copied—an expression of the increasing hold which, in the tenth century, the idea of the Crucifixion had laid on the imagination of Europe. ”

“ And then in this year, between the Nativity of St. Mary and St. Michael's-mass, they besieged Canterbury, and got into it through treachery, because Elfmar betrayed it, whose life the archbishop Elphege had before saved. And there they took the archbishop Elphege, and Elfward the king's steward, and the abbess Leofruna, [160] and bishop Godwin. [161] And abbat Elfmar [162] they let go away. And they took there within all the men in orders, and men and women: it is not to be told to any man how many there were. ”

“ Tucked away so cosily and standing its ground so sturdily amidst the pushing, elbowing crowd of new buildings all round, St. Ethelburga's has ready for each person who enters a glimpse of beauty to refresh the eyes, and a garment of peace in which to enwrap the spirit.
You pass under the low west gallery, and looking down the nave, with its pointed arches and clustered columns, see through the fretted screen at the east end, a red lamp burning dimly against the dull blue altar hangings. ”

“ Oldburgh isn't the town's name, of course, but it's a descriptive alias. The place itself is, unfortunately, the worst overworked southern capital 3 in fiction. It is one of the Old South's "types," boasting far more social leaders than sky-scrapers—and you can't suffer a blow-out on any pike near the city's limits that isn't flanked by a college campus.
"Oldburgh knows how I feel," mother replied. "If this baby had been a boy I should have named him Theodore—gift of God—but since she's a girl, her name is Grace." ”

“ Let us mount the flight of steps which lead by the entire length of the north side of the choir to the porch, and we shall see reason to class one at least of the architects of Erfurt, with the greatest of his race. No position can be conceived which would present more difficulty to one who wished to show the doors of his church to the people who might gather in crowds in the Dom-Platz, and seeing nothing but the tall east end of their church and the sharp perspective of its side, shrink from the attempt to find a door at the end of the long flight of steps before them. ”

“ Nothing distracts the attention from the giant bulk of the Cathedral.
How shall we come into Ely? As archæologists, as pilgrims spiritually inclined and chanting a sursum corda as we go, or shall we be gross and earthly, scenting lamb and green peas, spring duckling and asparagus from afar, for all the world like our hearty grandfathers of the coaching age, to whom the great white-faced Lamb Inn, that is still the principal hostelry of this city, appealed with much more force than that great grey religious pile? ”

“ Here too you will see the churches almost invariably with gabled aisles,—sometimes, as in the cathedral at Lemgo, so gabled at the sides that one doubts which is the side and which the end, and sometimes, as in a church at Brunswick, filled with tracery and panelling of extreme beauty. Then again at Halberstadt, Erfurt, Naumburg, and Marburg, you may see some of the most excellent work in all Germany of the best period. ”

“ It heard the sounds of fighting in the wars of the barons and in the wars of the Roses, and in the great Civil War Worcester repeatedly suffered, and within its boundaries the great battle of Worcester was fought, the last effort of a dying cause. The half-timbered houses of the Elizabethan and early Stuart times, the interesting churches, and streets that by their names record many a curious custom and phase of old English life, all remind us of ancient times and the manners of our forefathers. ”

“ Edmund's Chapel was therefore chosen as meeting all requirements. It lies on the south side of the Abbey, and is only separated from the Confessor's Shrine and the tombs of the kings by the ambulatory. Of all the tombs of that period in the Abbey, John of Eltham's is considered one of the most remarkable. He must have been the very pattern of a gallant young knight. His effigy of white alabaster impresses you at first with a sense of profound repose. Then when you look more closely you begin to see what a striking figure it is ”

“ In this little quiet church, which one might almost take for the crickets' cathedral, are the monuments of men who have won great names in English history. Here lies entombed the father of that Earl of Essex whom Elizabeth delighted to honour until she found a more attractive favourite. ”

“ If these things endure, alack and woe the while for our house of Ely, and for the monks of Saint Edmund’s-Bury, and for all Saxon houses! Our shrine boxes will be empty; we shall be neglected and forgotten in the land, even if the Normans do not dispossess us. ”

“ Among other things, King Ethelbert’s shrine was destroyed, and, although we hope that his bones were taken care of, and buried somewhere in the church, or else burned up altogether, we cannot tell for certain what became of them.
Now, if there is one thing which we admire more than another about the grand old builders of the Middle Ages, it is their perseverance.
They would spend a hundred years over the planning and building of a church, when one man died another taking his place ”

“ Acquiesced in, zealously adopted, with full assent of 'private judgment,' by all mortals.
The rest of St. Edmund's history, for the reader sees he has now become a Saint, is easily conceivable. Pious munificence provided him a loculus, a feretrum or shrine; built for him a wooden chapel, a stone temple, ever widening and growing by new pious gifts;—such the overflowing heart feels it a blessedness to solace itself by giving. St. Edmund's Shrine glitters now with diamond flowerages, with a plating of wrought gold. The wooden chapel, as we say, has become a stone temple. ”

“ The Normans, who came to England, did not forget their art. They built Ely Cathedral in the midst of the Fens, and Durham, overlooking the river. "You might see churches rise in every village and monasteries in the towns and cities, built after a style unknown before," says William of Malmesbury. ”

“ Edmund, a prince of East Anglia, by the Danes, commemorative of his having been lord abbot of Bury before he was preferred to the see of Ely; the niches in the sides of the prelate's stall have statuettes—on the left, St. Etheldreda, an abbess crowned, and a nun; on the right, a king, an abbot, and a monk: at the top on each side of the head are angels with censers, and other symbolical figures. [Pg 77]
The monument or shrine which was formerly placed over the tomb of Bishop Hotham, has been in part restored, and now occupies the third arch on the north side. ”

“ Such are the tales still told in our county of the olden days at Elmwood—tales handed down from father to son, and preserved in the memories of the old inhabitants of Pasquotank. And all such memories should be preserved and recorded ere those who hold them dear have passed away, and with them, the traditions that picture to a generation all too heedless of the past, the life of these, our pioneer forefathers.
From this old home more distinguished men have gone forth than probably from any other home in North Carolina. ”

“ The quiet old street has Colleges on either hand, Lincoln, Exeter, and Jesus. Retracing our footsteps, we get the fine view of All Saints which is given in the third illustration. The history of this Church, known originally as All Hallows, goes back to the twelfth century, but the present building, designed by Dr. Aldrich, a former Dean of Christ Church, has only been in existence since 1708, the old one having been destroyed in 1699 by the fall of its spire. The present graceful tower and spire are a worthy memorial of Dean Aldrich's versatility. ”