Chapter XVIII
WORTHY OF A GREAT PAST
These are times when it means much to know where some things are whose roots run far back and deep down. Before me as I write is a cathedral-shaped block of age-bevelled and worm-eaten English heart of oak. Its miniature spires rise not at all unlike those of a Gothic cathedral. It came from one of the original roof-beams of Holy Trinity in Hull, the largest parish church in England. As the warden placed it in my hands, his arm swept the high and vaulted nave and he said, "Six hundred and thirty-four years ago it was placed here." Six hundred and thirty-four years ago! Two hundred and eight years before Columbus started on his journey! Six centuries, and nearly a half more, before I stood there that fragment was part of a mighty support lifted by the hands of men and fitted above an altar that even then stood upon the ruins of another altar.
America is very young, but in a new and very vital way she now enters into the brave and worthy things of the past.
Six weeks in England and Scotland during a campaign for wartime prohibition gave me a vivid picture of the motherland and her unrelenting traditions, her customs anchored in the ages, her unyielding might. It was early in the year; but even so the fields had begun to smile, the grass was green, and presently the hedges began to bud. The khaki-colored lanes—for soldiers were on every path—were bursting into song; there were birds everywhere.
I walked by the Humber, down which some of the Pilgrim Fathers sailed; and in Southampton far to the south I stood before the new Pilgrim monument just in front of the ruins of King John's water-palace. Here John Alden, "a youth of the city," joined the immortal company; and from the dock hard by the Mayflower sailed.
I wandered down the streets Dickens has immortalized, and I climbed the "keep" of Conisboro, and stood in the window where Sir Walter Scott placed Rebecca and the wounded Ivanhoe. I heard my footsteps echo through the cathedrals of London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. That supremely exquisite creation at York, a spectacle of worship, burst upon my enraptured gaze like a palace from heaven.
At dusk I followed Canon Braithwaite through the cathedral at Winchester, England's ancient capital. It was at the close of a vesper service of song and prayer. Here twenty-three of England's kings are buried, and here until Henry VIII. all were crowned. Here the Crusaders came for their parting consecration; across these Norman tiles they tramped ere they turned their faces toward the distant sepulchre; here is "Bloody Mary's" wedding-chair, the gift of a pope; and the great Canute, whose kingly dust reposes somewhere beneath the nave, after he had learned his lesson from the tide that refused to obey his will, left his crown upon the figure of the Christ just above this old altar. In one portion of the cathedral space is an ancient well that was in the temple of Diana erected nineteen hundred years ago upon the spot now covered by the cathedral itself.
While the gray-haired canon talked of the priceless treasures for which he has long been responsible, the choir-boys began their practice. The music filled the mighty building, and rang in a hundred echoes from column to column and from the tiles of the floor to the perfectly joined stones of the vaulted roof. The flare of our torch so lighted the sculptured figures that they seemed alive and moving through the air; the singing became the voices of these men and women, some of whom were good, all of whom were human, and who spoke so long ago.
I found particular satisfaction in treading the stones of Rochdale, the city of John Bright. Here during our Civil War, in spite of "soup-kitchens" and pestilence, the cotton-workers stood against any petition to the English government to demand the lifting of the blockade of the Southern ports. John Bright's influence for freedom was quite as effective at home as it was in Parliament.