The roof terrace has a wide view over the City of Baltimore, as well as of the heavens which encompass it. We sit there in our wheel chairs or lie tucked up in our rolling beds and talk flows freely. We watch the flocks of pigeons making endless circles in the upper air; the black and solemn buzzards hanging above us unmoved though the gale blow ever so fiercely; the cloud shadows moving over the panorama; the haze of mist and steam and smoke floating over the City; the ever-changing pageant of fleeting clouds and blue sky and blazing sunsets. At one time—
"And when the wind from place to place
Doth the unmoored cloud galleons chase"—
we follow the white fleets as they sail away towards the south, ever replaced by new armadas surging up and over the northern horizon. At another time in range beyond range of snowy clouds, we see rise before us the Delectable Mountains beyond which is the Land of Beulah where the shining ones go to and fro as messengers to the Celestial City.
It is said that an eye unused to the telescope cannot see the canals on the planet Mars, but that through the same instrument they are plainly visible to an eye trained to such observation. Sometimes, when the clouds have hung in white masses over the city, I have been eager to see what was hidden by those luminous walls, but my untrained eyes could not pierce them. Day after day, however, I became more familiar with them. Others before now, without journeying like Columbus to prove the truth of his visions, have, even by their own firesides, enjoyed Castles in the Air and Châteaux and great possessions in Spain. In like manner as the breeze moved the silver edges of the clouds, I had unexpectedly through the rifts views of strange lands and fair cities which I had never before seen or heard of. As they were indeed lovely, in all haste I tried to make rapid notes of them to prove the truth of my strange experience.
Far to the north over Homewood, a pile of mountainous clouds was rent for a short space by the breeze, and disclosed a Minster in a meadow land. Its name seemed to be Upthorpe-cum-Regis. Its tower rose before me over the busy life of the town and looked down on the mansion of the Squire and the house of the Dean. Close around the walls of the Minster, indeed within sound of its prayers and anthems, were clustered the graves of the dead,—the former generations who had made the life of the town and who built the church and worshipped at its altar. It was a town in which the characters described by Trollope or George Eliot or Jane Austen would have felt themselves at home.
Again when a sunset was filling the western sky with "the incomparable pomp of eve," a break in the clouds above the gilded towers of Cardinal Gibbons's Cathedral disclosed an Italian town on a lovely lake shore. Boats with colored sails lined the Riva of Ranconezzo. Two piazzas teeming with life surrounded the Duomo or Cathedral and from them there were wide views over lake and mountain scenery. It appears that in the long ago, the Cardinal Schalchi-Visconti was the benefactor of this town, and there on the hillside, tree embowered, was his villa with its little port for the lake boats. His tomb I also saw, not in the Duomo, but in the Bramantesque Church of Santa Prassede, a building resembling the many small churches in northern Italy due to the refined influence of Bramante. In my dreaming I entered the church, and found that the great Cardinal lies beneath a tomb carved by Mino da Fiesole on the north side of Santa Prassede.
Then on a cool and crisp day when clouds were scudding through the sky, between them there was revealed to me a French town that seemed to bear the name of Rocher-St.-Pol. There was the river Merle winding its way through meadow and woodland. A range of hills bounded the horizon and from the plain rose the Rock. Not far away the ruined castle of "La Dame Blanche" crowned a steep hill, and close to the town was the Château Beaumesnil, beetling over the wooded hillside and bristling with conical towers and burnished girouettes. The Grande Rue of Rocher-St.-Pol I saw winding between gabled and half-timbered houses towards the church on the summit, and finally a long flight of stairs called by the people Jacob's ladder brings the pilgrim to the terrace in front of the church door. The interior of Ste. Frédigonde showed me the same period of French Gothic which marks the cathedrals of Notre Dame at Paris and Rheims. Coming out from Jacob's ladder upon the Parvis, there was a wide view over the meadows and the river. At the moment when the cathedral door was disclosed to me, a procession of clergy bearing sacred relics emerged from the church. It passed between the ranks of prophets and martyrs whose effigies flank the portal, and vanished with its banners and vestments down the long incline of Jacob's ladder towards the old town.
And finally came a dismal day, at the end of which the west was lined with long streaks of red, and, just before sunset, through a lengthened break in the gray, I seemed to see an Island in the far Ægean. I think it must have been somewhere between the Ægina that looks across the waters to the Athenian Acropolis and the Assos which my friends in their youth dug from its grave. Let us call it Æginassos. Its buildings as I dimly saw them are in a remarkable condition of preservation. The white temple stood out on a promontory over the sea, and brought back to memory the temple-crowned headland at Sunium. Higher on the mountain-side was the Forum with its terraces and long colonnades. Steep and winding paths descended to the ancient port, and far across the water rose the heights of the Isles of Greece.
Here are the records of what I was privileged to see from the roof terrace of the Hospital. Made in bed or wheel chair and depending on the passing imagination of an invalid, the sketches are of necessity crude. Would that instead they were like the work of Claude or Turner, who were the great experts at seeing visions in the clouds and in transferring them to their paper! These drawings will, however, be a reminder that idle hours can be passed happily even during a long captivity! Opposite each drawing I have placed some quotations from various writers. Although these do not describe with exactness the places which no eye but mine has seen, yet they do picture others very like those which I saw from the hospital terrace.
A day at last arrived when the patient was suddenly released. After being the object of tender care for many weeks the outer world seemed very large and very hustling. It was with a certain timidity and almost with reluctance that facing it all he left the peaceful quiet of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.