Urvasi

“ We stayed long after we had made our pilgrimage to the brown palace, where Giovanni Santi reared his motherless immortal, long after we had walked through the decaying splendours of that fairy castle which saw the star of Frederic's dynasty go down not ninety years after it had arisen so brightly on the slopes of Monte Ingino. For Urbino, though she is old and faded, though the grass grows in her streets and flowering weeds spring from her cracked and tottering walls, is still a city beautiful, a golden crown upon the green hillside. ”

“ Oh, Ursula, I know a city in India where we might live, and you forget you ever ruled in Rome; yonder are other gods who are so old they have forgot to punish, and they would smile on you and me there, Ursula. Balthasar marches on the city, and you must be ruined and discovered—brought to an end so horrible. You have showed me a secret way out of the Vatican, use it now, this night. ”

“ And what a type that town is. “A city set upon a hill cannot be hid;” and surely as a school and a home, a home of learning and light, this place is both actually and figuratively set upon its hill. Everything of the past year has gone out into land after land, in letters and papers and narratives on all sides: the busy-boy mind and the busy-boy pen photographs most accurately all the minute incidents that interest their opening life, and it passes out everywhere. ”

“ We now neared the suburbs, which are very extensive, and swarming with population. I learnt that they entirely surrounded the capital, in an equal state of populousness. The barriers were now approached: and all the fears, which my accidental travelling acquaintance at Augsbourg had put into my head, began to revive and to take possession of me. But what has an honest man to fear? ”

“ A romantic interest has always attached to the [80] library at Urbino. The best scholars in Europe used to assemble at the palace, where Duke Federigo made such a gathering of books 'as had not been seen for a thousand years,' in the hall where Emilia and the pale Duke Guidubaldo led the pleasant debates described in the 'Cortegiano.' Federigo, the most successful general in the Italian wars, had built a palace of delight in his rude Urbino, in which he hoped to set a copy of every book in the world. ”

“ There is the atmosphere of a frontier town about Urga, for all its age and holiness and costly religious structures. Perhaps it is the great prevalence of mounted people as much as the rough-and-ready style of its architecture and streets which gives this feeling. ”

“ It is necessary to say something further about the position of the suburbs in the 15th century. Bābur quotes as especially suitable to Akhsī, the proverbial questions, ‘Where is the village?'2754 (qy. Akhsī-kīnt.) ‘Where are the trees?’ and these might be asked by some-one in the suburbs unable to see Akhsī or vice versâ. But granting that there were no suburbs within two miles of the town, why had the whole inner circle, two miles of Yāqūt’s four, gone out of cultivation? Erosion would have affected only land between the river and the town. ”

“ Within a short time, the town had lost almost all its venerable fathers and leading citizens, the men whose councils had governed and whose wisdom had guided them from the first years of the settlement of the place. Only those who are intimately acquainted with the condition of a community of simple manners and primitive feelings, such as were the early New-England settlements, can have an adequate conception of the degree to which the people were attached to their patriarchs, the extent of their dependence upon them, and the amount of the loss when they were removed. ”

“ I must add, moreover, to this account of their suburb, that the more wealthy members of their community do not now make their dwellings there. These generally inhabit houses in the better part of the city, and having the command of a large proportion of the floating capital of the country, they receive such marks of deference as the rich, under the most unfavourable circumstances, contrive to exact from the poor.
Among other objects in the Alt Stadt, which make powerful demands on the traveller's notice, the Rath-haus, or ancient Town-hall, and the Thein Kirche, stand conspicuously forward. ”

“ For six months the Archbishop of Bari wore an undisputed tiara, and Urban VI. succeeded quietly to Gregory. Urban was zealous for reform, passionately determined against simony, pure in his life, energetic, resolute; but virtue has seldom been manifest in so unlovable an Avatar. The man was a Neapolitan peasant: short, squat, coarse, and savage. He flung rude words and violent speeches like mud in the faces of his elegant French Cardinals. ”

“ It lies on a level, surrounded by hills, and seems as if it lay in the hollow of a large hand. The Union Village may be seen, a manufacturing place, extending up a gorge of the hills. It is amusing to see all the distributed property of the aristocracy and commonalty, the various and conflicting interests of the town, the loves and hates, compressed into a space which the eye takes in as completely as the arrangement of a tea-table. ”

“ They should be taught to see in the town common or village green a survival of that primitive institution of land-community upon which town and state are based. They should be taught the meaning of town and family names; how the word 'town' means, primarily, a place hedged in for the purposes of defence; how the picket-fences around home and house-lot are but a survival of the primitive town idea; how home, hamlet, and town live on together in a name like Hampton, or Home-town. They should investigate the most ordinary thing for these are often the most archaic. ”

“ And from this standpoint the holy city was a happy city; it had no suburbs. That is to say, there are all sorts of buildings outside the wall; but they are outside the wall. Everybody is conscious of being inside or outside a boundary; but it is the whole character of the true suburbs which grow round our great industrial towns that they grow, as it were, unconsciously and blindly, like grass that covers up a boundary line traced on the earth. ”

“ Our towns in the past have tended too much to resemble this latter unorganised condition, and it is largely to this fact that we owe the squalor, ugliness and haphazard character of their development; for there is no doubt that the town must represent the character of the social life of the people composing it, and that it will express by its form the social organisation upon which it is based. ”

“ To the left, another pilgrim is sitting, apparently to watch; further up, is a house, towards which all the pilgrims seem to be directing their steps to enter. A man and woman come out of this house to receive them with open arms. The third division continues the History of St. Ursula. Her attire, sitting in a vessel by the side of her husband Gutherus, is sumptuous in the extreme. I would have given four ducats for a copy of it, but Mr. Lewis was otherwise engaged. A Pope and Cardinal are to the right of St. Ursula: the whole being in a perfect blaze of splendour. ”

“ How many hundreds of these there are, not only in lama-town but everywhere in Urga, could be computed only by a man of energy and patience. Endless rows of large ones, each covered by a kind of sanctified guard-house, stretch along whole sides of the upper town; they line several of the principal streets; there must be at least one, that could better serve as outhouse, for every family in Urga. The small ones are as flies in summer. ”

“ Ulrich—for the Grödner Thal is the children's paradise, and supplies the little ones of all Europe with toys. In every house throughout the village—I might almost say in every house throughout the valley—you will find wood-carving, painting, or gilding perpetually going on; except only in the hay-making and harvest-time, when all the world goes up to the hills to mow and reap, and breathe the mountain air. ”

“ The suburb of Windsor enjoyed its share in this evidence of prosperity, and sanguine speculators, viewing through the glasses of a happy optimism a rush of new inhabitants to the fortunate city, erected in gleeful haste a multitude of dwellings for their purchase and occupancy. ”

“ Municipalities, Boards of Guardians, School Managers, and private owners often have both the control of people and land. If the Church would influence them, more children and more grown-ups might get health and pleasure on the land. I must not entrench on the subject of Garden Cities and Garden Suburbs—but the two subjects can be linked together, inasmuch as the purest, deepest, and most recreative of pleasures can be found in the gardens which are the distinctive feature of the new cities and suburbs. ”

“ Now, in all such towns, you will find, occasionally, an individual born with that sort of brain which, knowing that his town is backward, longs to start things toward improving it; not only its living conditions, but adding an institution or two, such as any city, big or small, maintains, gratis, for its inhabitants. But so forward looking a man finds that trying to instill any such notions into a town's ruling body is about as satisfactory as butting against a brick wall. ”

“ Having now a horse whereon to mount, I rode every day, either into the eastern town to pay a visit to the sheikh, or to the vizier, or roving around the whole circuit of the capital, and peeping into the varied scenes which the life of the people exhibited. The precincts of the town with its suburbs are just as interesting as its neighbourhood (especially during the months that precede the rainy season) is monotonous and tiresome in the extreme. ”

“ Those writers who have imagined a reign of peace and happiness on earth, have generally described a rural country, where each small township was directed by the elders and wise men. This was the key of my design. Each village, however small, usually contains a leader, one among themselves whom they venerate, whose advice they seek in difficulty, and whose good opinion they chiefly value. ”

“ To reconstitute the history of all that happened there—all that stood for so much in the life of a most remarkable man, and the story of a great country, we are fain to fall back on legends and on a few unreliable chroniclers. This suburb, the seat of a government, the centre of an administration, has slipped, as to both these memories, through the fingers of posterity, even that nearest to it ”

“ In front of the city are very large suburbs, built without any regard to order. These are inhabited by people of different nations—Turks, Greeks, Jews, Hungarians, Dalmatians, and many more.
Indeed, throughout the Turkish Empire the suburbs, as a rule, are larger than the towns, and suburbs and town together give the idea of a very considerable place. This was the first point at which I met with ancient coins, of which, as you know, I am94 very fond, and I find William Quacquelben, whom I mentioned before, a most admirable and devoted fellow-student in this hobby of mine. ”

“ Where the delights of Nature are comparatively few, on a wide, flat plain, distantly walled by low-looking hills, there has stood since the very twilight of Swedish history the town of Upsala—Lofty Halls. ”

“ Urfah is situated on the gentle slope of a bill, and extends into the plain below, which is covered with gardens for ten miles beyond the walls on the east and south-east. A small stream, called the Kara Koyoon, runs along the northern side of the town, and is crossed by three bridges leading severally to the Semsât, Serai, and Yeni Kapoosi, gates; it then turns to the north-east, and flows through the gardens into the open country beyond. The citadel occupies the summit of a hill to the southwest, and connects the turreted wall which extends round the town in an irregular circle. ”

“ The town planners of the Renaissance in like manner gave order and beauty to their cities, and their works, as being nearer our own time, we should study with special care, such examples for instance as may be seen in Paris, Karlsruhe, Turin, or Copenhagen. ”

“ The old inhabitants, reinforced by the new military and ecclesiastical populations, found the northern half of the city too strait for them, and a new walled town sprang up at the foot of the hill, and soon stretched out a long, narrow suburb southward, along the high-road, defended by parallel dykes. ”

“ The changes incident to city life in the birth, death, and marriage rates of the population are noticeable on the basis of statistics. These phenomena permit of sociological interpretation and analysis. The difference between the urban and the rural span of life offers a similar problem to the investigator. The proportions of the human scrap-heap and its social consequences in the city have been recognized as an important phase of urban existence. ”

“ Talk to Urvan and his Karbix as you have talked to me, of coöperation and of mutual advancement. If they will coöperate, we will."
During the long voyage to Urvania, the third planet of the fourteenth sun, however, their new ardor cooled perceptibly—particularly that of the younger man—and in Urvan's palace it became clear that the love of peaceful culture inculcated upon those fierce minds by contact with more humane peoples could not supplant immediately the spirit of strife bred into bone and fiber during thousands of generations of incessant warfare. ”