ELY.
We are at the seat of another of the famed cathedrals, having arrived in just an hour's ride from Norwich; so on this remarkably fine day as it is proving to be,—at home in Boston, America, we should call it a first-class middle-of-May one,—valises deposited at the railroad station, our stay not to be long, we are soon walking about the city. This is a small rural place, situated on the River Ouse, and with a population of 8,000. It is exceedingly rural in aspect, and has but little look of business or manufactures. Half embowered with trees, the octagonal tower of the cathedral is looming up in the distance, a half-mile away. The place has one principal street, and but few others of more than ordinary importance, and while clean to a fault, it has many old buildings, and little that is new; and, as before intimated, gardens and lawns are common, and the entire place has a charmingly rural character. The churches of St. Mary and of Holy Trinity are remarkable for their age and an ancient splendor. There was a convent founded here about 673, by Etheldreda, wife of Egfrid, King of Northumberland, and she was its first abbess. It was destroyed by the Danes in 870, and one hundred years later was rebuilt by Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, who placed in it monks instead of nuns. The city is on an island, and is said to have received its name from the great quantity of eels that used to be taken here. It has some manufactures of earthen-ware, and tobacco-pipes, and there are also flax and hemp-seed oil-mills, and lime-kilns; but the principal source of income for the laboring people is agriculture, and it has very extensive gardens for the cultivation of market vegetables, the produce of which is mainly sent to Cambridge, sixteen miles away, for use at the colleges.
The monastery and former abbey being established here, made it at an early day one of the celebrated religious centres of England; and, as often the case, the church of the institution was important, and in time became a cathedral. The See was established in 1107. In 1066 Thurston was abbot, and he defended the Isle of Ely seven years against William the Conqueror. In 1081 Simeon, a prior of Winchester, was abbot, and laid the foundation of the present cathedral.
In 1107, as before stated, the See was established, and Hervey, who had been Bishop of Bangor,—and, it is said for good reasons, had been driven away,—was elected Abbot of Ely; that is, he was head of the monastery. He made an effort to have this a seat of the bishop, and, succeeding, was himself made its first bishop. Simeon, who laid the cathedral foundation, lived only long enough to finish the choir and one transept, and of his work this transept only now remains.
The nave, the great western tower as high as the first battlements, and the south transept were finished, the former in 1174, and the latter in 1189. The great western portico was begun in 1200, and finished in 1215. In 1552 extensions were made, and in 1322 the octagonal lantern of the tower was begun, and it was finished in 1328. A spire of wood was built on this in 1342, which was afterwards removed. Various repairs and restorations have been from then till now going on, and we have it at present in fine condition of repair. It is built of a grayish, or dark soapstone-colored stone, resembling the cathedral at Salisbury; and on the stone is a large lot of lichens,—a species of fungus or moss, such as is often seen on our common stones of field walls, though so very thin and close to the stone as at times to appear simply like a stain on the material. The building is 517 feet long, 179 feet wide at the transepts, and the nave and aisles are respectively 78 feet wide and 70 feet high.
A marked and important feature of this cathedral is the great west tower, on the four corners of which are large octagonal buttress piers, ending in very lofty turrets, crowned with battlements; and inside of these, but somewhat lower, is an octagonal lantern section, also crowned with an embattled parapet. The tower is very elaborate and elegant in its finish and proportions, and is in all 306 feet high. Another peculiarity of the cathedral is that at the intersection of the nave, transepts, and choir, are four subordinate sides in which are elegant windows, and the whole great octagon, ending at the outside lines with groined work; and the centre part is a lantern which is open well up into the great tower over it.
The interior of this cathedral is elegant and wonderfully elaborate, and is excelled by no cathedral in the kingdom. Here, if anywhere, may it be said that rich Gothic architecture is "frozen music." Speak as favorably as one will of other cathedrals, they may yet be lavish in praise of Ely; and it may be added that the painted glass windows are incredibly fine and in keeping with the grand building they illuminate. Of one thing we repeatedly speak, and it is that we are glad that we did not see the interior of a cathedral like this first; else many of the others would have appeared tame and weak. All, however, have their own peculiar glories, and, as productions of art, do their own respective work.
There are but few monuments of note in the cathedral. There were once, however, many of bishops, priors, and deans, but all have been destroyed or removed but two; they are of Bishop Gray and of Lewis de Luxemburg, who was made bishop in 1438, and who held the bishopric by special dispensation of the Pope, being at the same time Archbishop of Rouen, France, and also a cardinal.
Among the eminent men who have been bishops of this cathedral is Matthew Wren, who was elected bishop in 1638. He was uncle of the distinguished architect of St. Paul's at London, Sir Christopher Wren, and he held the following offices at different periods: Master of St. Peter's College, Cambridge; Dean of Windsor; and Bishop of Hereford, and also of Norwich. He was a great sufferer during the Usurpation and the Rebellion, but outlived both, and before his death saw peace and tranquility restored. In looking over the list of Ely's bishops, one is astonished to observe how eminent they must have been, if we may judge from their having previously been bishops in other cathedrals. Simon Langham, elected here in 1332, was a cardinal, and, after being here, was bishop at Canterbury. Thomas de Armdel, of 1374, was translated to York, and then to Canterbury. John Morton, of 1478, was afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas Goodrich, of 1534, was once Bishop of Westminster, and also of Norwich. Simon Patrick, of 1691, was at Chichester as bishop, and was dean at Peterboro'. Remarkable confidence seems to have been reposed in the bishops of Ely for uprightness and integrity, and a business talent as well; for as many as twelve of them were chancellors of England, and four of them founded colleges or were masters at Cambridge.
As we try to select a few items of especial interest from the vast amount before us, the task is bewildering, and when a final work has been done, it is so meagre and paltry as to cause uncomfortable thoughts, and put to flight all anticipations of even a reasonable satisfaction.
These vast buildings, so elegant in decoration, so aged, so satisfying to the beholder, as remarkable works of skill in decorative and constructive points of view, are great museums and libraries of themselves; and to the reflective observer there are "sermons in stones." When here and at like places, we are amid the results of the anticipations and prayers and labors of centuries. We go back to the day when a lot of mortals, full of a pious aspiration for the good and the true,—yet superstitious,—were travelling over these spots in quest of a best place for study and repose; and they at last here rested, and founded an abbey or monastery, a priory it may be, or a simple nunnery. By-and-by the foundation of a great church was to be laid, but with no hope or expectation of ever seeing those foundation walls of an entire cathedral reach even the earth's surface: comprehending the scheme, they plied themselves to the task, and labored and died; others came, the walls arose, and centuries passed. Tower, battlement, and roof climbed heavenward, and then came consecration and worship, but never rest. Death of prelate, then monuments were in order; repairs of cathedral; civil wars, rebellions, destruction of the art-work of centuries; overturnings of doctrines, disputes, and surrender of cathedral, and all its sacred belongings come; new doctrines are inaugurated, and become the law of the land. Generations after generations are born and die. The cathedral grows old, aged; the grounds only remain as they were; and not as they were, for the soil is raised by the dust of the thousands that are buried and moulder in it, and so, in transfigured glory, even the old trees that throw their grateful shadows have in their fibre earth that was once the royal bone and flesh and sinew of bishop, cardinal, or king. 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. That decays, and as an organized thing ceases to be, but the influence of thought dies never. We know not into whose little mass of earth, whose narrow house, the rootlets of the tree whose branches shade us have gone, and taken up their infinitesimal particles of human earth, and carried it on to make leaf and blossom, or fibre of wood or bark. We know it has been done, and is yet doing, and has been so for centuries; for, as Shakespeare has it:—
Imperious Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away;
Oh that the earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!
Not seen as fact, with material eyes, but known beyond peradventure by the less material thought; so it is of the deeds done,—living and acting, when the authors are dead, as the world judges and declares. But are not the great arch and pillar of nave influential now? Is not the elegant decoration of cut stone refining to those of this day? Does not the largeness even of the cathedral inspire us now to do large things? Does not the patience of monk, of old bishop, of the master mind of those back ages,—content to but lay a foundation and then resignedly die,—does not that beget the like, even in this hurrying nineteenth-century time? And the determination of Cromwell or of Henry VIII., even though destructionists,—iconoclasts not only of stone, but unwittingly of superstitions and religious tyranny,—though in a sense tyrants themselves, does not their work make it comfortable for free conscientious worship now? Does not the work of such ones and their sustaining bishops,—of martyrs, by their faithfulness and sacrifices even of life itself,—do not these make our good conditions possible, which but for them would never have been? Cathedral is museum and library; it is shrine,—inspiring thought and evolving new good, and in no way inferior to picture-gallery or depository of mechanical production or of curious art.
A long digression this, and but for the license we at the start reserved, apology would be due. We greatly enjoyed Ely and all things in it. A fine long walk came next, from the cathedral off half a mile into a back road, where, amid the good suburban shade of overhanging garden trees, and enveloped in the nice odor of flowers, we took our last view of the old structure, and turned our feet to the station. Dreamish was the whole thing. A few hours ago we were not in sight of the famed place, where has crystallized the greatness engendered by centuries. A choice bit of earth, covered over and enveloped in extraordinary history and momentous events, the site of any cathedral is. A few hours only there at the shrine, and the material curtain for us two drops, and never perhaps to be raised while we are in the flesh. It was another scene of lightning-like presentation, but the photograph was taken. The impression is clear, clean-cut of detail and outline; and though it may be dimmed it will never be effaced, nor beyond recall. We leave the famed place, and, entering the station, sit mute in our car. The common things of every-day life take us in charge. Engine, embankments, bridges, tunnels, fields, every-day things, terribly modern, come up in front, and gently absorb attention. The mind quietly and imperceptibly yields. We are kindly let down, and the spell is broken.
We are on our way to Cambridge. It's 6.30 p. m. only, and that's early for these long English June days. Classic and worthily renowned Cambridge! Our thoughts go on and not back now. When one has been thinking of a great thing, it's a comfort, when ruthlessly removing from it, to be permitted to think of another as great or greater.