Again we recalled our visit to the Great Cathedral of Cologne, the most complete piece of Gothic architecture anywhere to be found. We mounted the steps of one of the gigantic towers which lift their sublime heads to a height of five hundred two feet, the exact length of the cathedral. Here we gazed out over the level plain that stretched away to the marvelous scenic region of the Seven Mountains. The foundation of this beautiful structure was laid two hundred fifty years before the discovery of America and fifty years before the founding of the Turkish Empire. But the last stone was not laid on the south tower until 1880.
As we listened to the deep-toned bells, how we were thrilled with visions of the past! Here lived Colonia Agrippina, the daughter of Germanicus and the mother of Nero. It was from Cologne that Hadrian received his summons to Rome as emperor. Here, too, Vitellius and Silvanus were both proclaimed emperor in this remote northern camp on the left bank of the Rhine.
But you do not dwell long on the past, for here stands this colossal, magnificent cathedral with its incomparable towers to call your attention to the glorious achievements of man. Men were not the only ones to use this noble edifice as a sanctuary, for out and in among its superb towers numerous birds darted to and fro, where they dwelt safely as in a citadel. Pretty falcons circled gracefully about them as though they were crags of some wild mountain; rooks cawed from their lofty stations below the bells; chimney swifts glued their log cabins to rough stone ledges, and in various niches above the doorway pigeons placed their nests and uttered their messages of peace to all who entered. English sparrows, too, had taken possession here and there just as their countrymen had taken possession of the city.
As we entered the cathedral a mingled feeling of awe and devotion came over us. But it was not the blazing shrine of the eleven thousand Virgins, the magnificent windows through which the morning sunbeams filtered, nor yet the choir, perhaps the most wonderful in the world, that produced this feeling of reverence. "We remembered that this glorious structure had been erected to the 'God of Peace' in the midst of strife and bitterness, and by men estranged by the first principle of the Gospel." But here we beheld French officers, Scotch Highlanders, English and American soldiers, scattered among the Germans, reverently kneeling, devout and hushed at the Consecration. Then we thought how "notwithstanding the passions of men and wickedness of rulers, the building up of the Church of God and of the Christian faith, goes steadily on, unrecorded but continuous."
But here among these lovely Ohio hills, where the Master Architect erected and is still building these wonderful temples that never decay, we were more impressed by their solemn grandeur than any work of man could inspire. Here long before the cathedrals of Europe were thought of, a primitive people erected their altars and offered up their sacrifice to their gods. Here as the rays of the sun filtered through the leafy windows of the trees falling upon the richly wrought mosaic of ferns and flowers, where the gorgeous cardinal blossoms flamed from a hundred altars and the bell-like song of the wood thrush rang through all the dim aisles, these ancient people felt the presence of a higher power, and not yet knowing that their god required the sacrifice of noble lives and loving hearts, brought to the altar the best gifts they knew.
Standing alone in this fair solitude, as much alone as if we had been on some fairy isle of a distant sea, we felt that we were surrounded by a strange, mysterious presence, and thoughts and fancies, like weird articulate voices of those ancient people, filled the solemn place. The aged trees sighed in the evening wind, telling over and over their mournful legends, lest they forget. The storm-swept maples repeated their "rhythmical runes of these unremembered ages." We allowed ourselves to sink soothingly beneath deep waves of primitive emotions until we seemed to perceive the sagas that the maples told the elms of a more remote history than that of the Pharaohs or storied Greece.
Darkness began to settle over this lonely spot. Along the silent and gloomy road we seemed to see shadowlike forms that flitted here and there through the blackness of darkest night, a blackness only relieved by a few stars that peered like silent spectators from the dark draperies of clouds. Now a band of people was seen moving not swiftly to the accompaniment of martial music, but slowly and silently to the sighing night wind. As we watched a lurid flame burst from the center of the oval while a strange figure bent over it as he performed his weird mystical rites. Now the light from the red and yellow flames fell upon a vast group of dark figures and a thousand gleaming eyes peered out of the velvety canopy around us. The mournful distressing notes of the ghost bird broke the stillness. The scream of some passing night bird replied as if in answer to their weird calls. A great horned owl made us shiver with his "hoo, hoo, hoo," as the flame shot upward in scarlet circles. The night wind stirred the branches, which sighed audibly, and died away leaving the place lonelier than before. Then the sharp bark of a fox rang out from a neighboring hill. The breeze started up again and a limb of a tree that rubbed against its neighbor produced a wailing sound as of some one in distress. We could see fantastic shapes out among the gnarled tree trunks and ghostly forms appeared in the velvety shadows and vanished again among the trees. The moon rose out over the rim of the eastern hills and seemed almost to pause as if some Oriental Magic was being wrought. A mist arose from the river and hovered over the valley below us; the complaining water of Brush creek mingled with the wailing of the screech owl as the ghostly footfalls sounded more remote. The bullfrog's harsh troonk "ushered in the night" and, imagining one of them as the very one that escaped the serpent and leaped into the creek centuries ago, we left the place to the spirits of that unknown age and the moonlight.
But why this concern over a vanished race? Why all this worry over the Coliseum or Parthenon? Why so eager to learn of these crumbling mounds and broken down embankments in our own land? Then as if we heard a voice from the shadowy past, rising from these silent ruins, we begin to gain their secret at last. The Parthenon and Coliseum call up the sad story with its yet sadder truth that true weal can only come to that nation that plans for the future. Yet each adds something to the onward march of civilization.
In the ancient gardens of France and Italy the nightingale still warbles her divine hymn, all unmindful of Caesar's conquests. The whippoorwill calls in her plaintive notes through the silvery spring nights over the graves of this vanished race of America. Let us concern ourselves about the past only as that past shall contribute to a more glorious future. It is not mounds, pyramids, or bronze tablets we should be building for later generations of archaeologists to puzzle their brains over.
A large and beautiful mound standing in the precincts of the original plat of Columbus, Ohio, was demolished, the clay taken therefrom and used as the material for the bricks with which the first State House was built. Here where a thousand years came and went and the Indian warrior reverently spared the last resting place of these unrecorded dead, another people reared their legislative halls out of their mouldering sepulchres and crumbling bones. O, American Nation, with your wonderful civilization of today, it is well to pause here amid the "steam shriek" career of your harried life with all its getting and spending, to contemplate the ruin of even this once consecrated piece of ground.