Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

The town of Aberdeen is a very fine one, and owes much of its beauty to the light-colored granite of which most of the houses are built. It has broad, clean, beautiful streets, and many very curious and interesting public buildings. The town exhibits that union of the hoary past with the bustling present which is characteristic of the old world.

It has two parts, the old and the new, as unlike as L'Allegro and Penseroso—the new, clean, and modern; the old, mossy and dreamy. The old town is called Alton, and has venerable houses, standing, many of them, in ancient gardens. And here rises the peculiar, old, gray cathedral. These Scotch cathedrals have a sort of stubbed appearance, and look like the expression in stone of defiant, invincible resolution. This is of primitive granite, in the same heavy, massive style as the cathedral of Glasgow, but having strong individualities of its own.

Whoever located the ecclesiastical buildings of England and Scotland certainly had an exquisite perception of natural scenery; for one notices that they are almost invariably placed on just that point of the landscape, where the poet or the artist would say they should be. These cathedrals, though all having a general similarity of design, seem, each one, to have its own personality, as much as a human being. Looking at nineteen of them is no compensation to you for omitting the twentieth; there will certainly be something new and peculiar in that.

This Aberdeen Cathedral, or Cathedral of St. Machar, is situated on the banks of the River Don; one of those beautiful amber-brown rivers that color the stones and pebbles at the bottom with a yellow light, such as one sees in ancient pictures. Old trees wave and rustle around, and the building itself, though a part of it has fallen into ruins, has, in many parts, a wonderful clearness and sharpness of outline. I cannot describe these things to you; architectural terms convey no picture to the mind. I can only tell you of the character and impression it bears—a character of strong, unflinching endurance, appropriately reminding one of the Scotch people, whom Walter Scott compares to the native sycamore of their hills, "which scorns to be biased in its mode of growth, even by the influence of the prevailing wind, but shooting its branches with equal boldness in every direction, shows no weather side to the storm, and may be broken, but can never be bended."

One reason for the sharpness and distinctness of the architectural preservation of this cathedral is probably that closeness of texture for which Aberdeen granite is remarkable. It bears marks of the hand of violence in many parts. The images of saints and bishops, which lie on their backs with clasped hands, seem to have been wofully maltreated and despoiled, in the fervor of those days, when people fondly thought that breaking down carved work was getting rid of superstition. These granite saints and bishops, with their mutilated fingers and broken noses, seem to be bearing a silent, melancholy witness against that disposition in human nature, which, instead of making clean the cup and platter, breaks them altogether.

The roof of the cathedral is a splendid specimen of carving in black oak, wrought in panels, with leaves and inscriptions in ancient text. The church could once boast in other parts (so says an architectural work) a profusion of carved woodwork of the same character, which must have greatly relieved the massive plainness of the interior.

In 1649, the parish minister attacked the "High Altar," a piece of the most splendid workmanship of any thing of the kind in Europe, and which had to that time remained inviolate; perhaps from the insensible influence of its beauty. It is said that the carpenter employed for the purpose was so struck with the noble workmanship, that he refused to touch it till the minister took the hatchet from his hand and gave the first blow.

These men did not consider that "the leprosy lies deep within," and that when human nature is denied beautiful idols, it will go after ugly ones. There has been just as unspiritual a resting in coarse, bare, and disagreeable adjuncts of religion, as in beautiful and agreeable ones; men have worshipped Juggernaut as pertinaciously as they have Venus or the Graces; so that the good divine might better have aimed a sermon at the heart than an axe at the altar.

We lingered a long time around here, and could scarcely tear ourselves away. We paced up and down under the old trees, looking off on the waters of the Don, listening to the waving branches, and falling into a dreamy state of mind, thought what if it were six hundred years ago! and we were pious simple hearted old abbots! What a fine place that would be to walk up and down at eventide or on a Sabbath morning, reciting the penitential psalms, or reading St. Augustine!

I cannot get over the feeling, that the souls of the dead do somehow connect themselves with the places of their former habitation, and that the hush and thrill of spirit, which we feel in them, may be owing to the overshadowing presence of the invisible. St. Paul says, "We are compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses." How can they be witnesses, if they cannot see and be cognizant?