[Footnote A: Miss Martineau, who went to his funeral, and may be supposed to describe after a visit to the churchyard, gives the inscription incorrectly. See Atlantic Monthly for May, 1861, p. 552. Tourists cannot be trusted; stereographs can.]
And as we have been looking at a steeple, let us flit away for a moment and pay our reverence at the foot of the tallest spire in England,—that of Salisbury Cathedral. Here we see it from below, looking up,—one of the most striking pictures ever taken. Look well at it; Chichester has just fallen, and this is a good deal like it,—some have thought raised by the same builder. It has bent somewhat (as you may see in these other views) from the perpendicular; and though it has been strengthened with clamps and framework, it must crash some day or other, for there has been a great giant tugging at it day and night for five hundred years, and it will at last shut up into itself or topple over with a sound and thrill that will make the dead knights and bishops shake on their stone couches, and be remembered all their days by year-old children. This is the first cathedral we ever saw, and none ever so impressed us since. Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five- or six-foot personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with the little life of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your heart seems to trivial a movement to take reckoning of. In the buttressed hollow of one of these palaeozoic cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which your breathing structure reposes. Before we leave Salisbury, let us look for a moment into its cloisters. A green court-yard, with a covered gallery on its level, opening upon it through a series of Gothic arches. You may learn more, young American, of the difference between your civilization and that of the Old World by one look at this than from an average lyceum-lecture an hour long. Seventy years of life means a great deal to you; how little, comparatively, to the dweller in these cloisters! You will have seen a city grow up about you, perhaps; your whole world will have been changed half a dozen times over. What change for him? The cloisters are just as when he entered them,—just as they were a hundred years ago,—just as they will be a hundred years hence.
These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison what are best worth seeing, of a man's handiwork, in Europe. How great the delight to be able to bring them, bodily, as it were, to our own firesides! A hundred thousand pilgrims a year used to visit Canterbury. Now Canterbury visits us. See that small white mark on the pavement. That marks the place where the slice of Thomas à Becket's skull fell when Reginald Fitz Urse struck it off with a "Ha!" that seems to echo yet through the vaulted arches. And see the broad stains, worn by the pilgrims' knees as they climbed to the martyr's shrine. For four hundred years this stream of worshippers was wearing itself into these stones. But there was the place where they knelt before the altar called "Beckets's Crown." No! the story that those deep hollows in the marble were made by the pilgrims' knees is too much to believe,—but there are the hollows, and that is the story.
And now, if you would see a perfect gem of the art of photography, and at the same time an unquestioned monument of antiquity which no person can behold without interest, look upon this,—the monument of the Black Prince. There is hardly a better piece of work to be found. His marble effigy lies within a railing, with a sounding board. Above this, on a beam stretched between two pillars, hang the arms he wore at the Battle of Poitiers,—the tabard, the shield, the helmet, the gauntlets, and the sheath that held his sword, which weapon it is said that Cromwell carried off. The outside casing of the shield has broken away, as you observe, but the lions or lizards, or whatever they were meant for, and the flower-de-laces or plumes may still be seen. The metallic scales, if such they were, have partially fallen from the tabard, or frock, and the leather shows bare in parts of it.
Here, hard by, is the sarcophagus of Henry IV. and his queen, also inclosed with a railing like the other. It was opened about thirty years ago, in presence of the dean of the cathedral. There was a doubt, so it was said, as to the monarch's body having been really buried there. Curiosity had nothing to do with it, it is to be presumed. Every over-ground sarcophagus is opened sooner or later, as a matter of course. It was hard work to get it open; it had to be sawed. They found a quantity of hay,—fresh herbage, perhaps, when it was laid upon the royal body four hundred years ago,—and a cross of twigs. A silken mask was on the face. They raised it and saw his red beard, his features well preserved, a gap in the front-teeth, which there was probably no court-dentist to supply,—the same the citizens looked on four centuries ago
"In London streets that coronation-day,
When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary";
then they covered it up to take another nap of a few centuries, until another dean has an historical doubt,—at last, perhaps, to be transported by some future Australian Barnum to the Sidney Museum and exhibited as the mummy of one of English Pharaohs. Look, too, at the "Warriors' Chapel," in the same cathedral. It is a very beautiful stereograph, and may be studied for a long time, for it is full of the most curious monuments.
Before leaving these English churches and monuments, let us enter, if but for a moment, the famous Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick. The finest of the views (323, 324) recalls that of the Black Prince's tomb, as a triumph of photography. Thus, while the whole effect of the picture is brilliant and harmonious, we shall find, on taking a lens, that we can count every individual bead in the chaplet of the monk who is one of the more conspicuous reliefs on the sarcophagus. The figure of this monk itself is about half an inch in height, and its face may be completely hidden by the head of a pin. The whole chapel is a marvel of workmanship and beauty. The monument of Richard Beauchamp in the centre, with the frame of brass over the recumbent figure, intended to support the drapery thrown upon it to protect the statue,—with the mailed shape of the warrior, his feet in long-pointed shoes resting against the muzzled bear and the griffin, his hands raised, but not joined,—this monument, with the tomb of Dudley, Earl of Leicester,—Elizabeth's Leicester, —and that of the other Dudley, Earl of Warwick,—all enchased in these sculptured walls and illuminated through that pictured window, where we can dimly see the outlines of saints and holy maidens,—form a group of monumental jewels such as only Henry VII.'s Chapel can equal. For these two pictures (323 and 324) let the poor student pawn his outside-coat, if he cannot have them otherwise.
Of abbeys and castles there is no end, ago No. 4, Tintern Abbey, is the finest, on the whole, we have ever seen. No. 2 is also very perfect and interesting. In both, the masses of ivy that clothe the ruins are given with wonderful truth and effect. Some of these views have the advantage of being very well colored. Warwick Castle (81) is one of the best and most the interesting of the series of castles; Caernarvon is another still more striking.
We may as well break off here as anywhere, so far as England is concerned. England is one great burial-ground to an American. As islands are built up out of the shields of insects, so her soil is made the land of Burns, and see what one man can do to idealize and glorify the common life about him! Here is a poor "ten-footer", as we should call it, the cottage William "Burness" built with his own hands, where he carried his young bride Agnes, and where the boy Robert, his first-born, was given to the light and air which he made brighter and freer for mankind. Sit still and do not speak,—but see that your eyes do not grow dim as these pictures pass before them: The old hawthorn under which Burns sat with Highland Mary,—a venerable duenna-like tree, with thin arms and sharp elbows, and scanty chevelure of leaves; the Auld Brig o' Doon (No. 4),—a daring arch that leaps the sweet stream at a bound, more than half clad in a mantle of ivy, which has crept with its larva-like feet beyond the key-stone; the Twa Brigs of Ayr, with the beautiful reflections in the stream that shines under their eyebrow-arches; and poor little Alloway Kirk, with its fallen roof and high gables. Lift your hand to your eyes and draw a long breath,—for what words would come so near to us as these pictured, nay, real, memories of the dead poet who made a nation of a province, and the hearts of mankind its tributaries?