Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

There followed visits to the world's greatest centers of interest, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo, Karnak or Old Thebes, and Rome, while side trips more or less extended were taken across Europe, from Naples to Edinburgh, from the Italian Lakes with their unsurpassed beauties to the English Lakes with their numerous literary associations connected with Wordsworth, Coleridge and others.

In these pages, we are to change the order of approach, and the last shall be first, in order that, as we advance, we may be getting farther and farther into the Orient. The eternal city can be approached not only by the Mediterranean but also across the Continent. That is the way we first went thither, and we will in a rapid sketch repeat the itinerary. At Westminster Abbey in the Chapel of Edward the Confessor, we look with rapt attention on England's Coronation Chair. It contains the famous Stone of Scone, on which, if tradition be correct, Jacob pillowed his head when he had the vision of angels ascending and descending on the ladder connecting earth and heaven. Upon this Scottish kings were crowned from the time of Kenneth the Second in 840 A. D., till Edward the First of England in 1296 carried it to London. Sitting above this as encased in an oaken chair, every ruler of Britain since has been crowned. English suffragettes to their discredit not long ago tried with dynamite to destroy this venerable relic.

We cross to Paris with its magnificent boulevards and its far-reaching parks. We linger in the Louvre, with its treasures of painting and sculpture. There we see the Venus of Melos (from the island of that name), representing the best days of Greek art, and antedating the beginning of the Christian era, perhaps by four centuries. Older still is the Moabite Stone there, speaking of the "king of Israel" nine

centuries before Christ, and yet more ancient is the inscribed Stela of Hammurabi who preceded the patriarch Abraham. To these two antiquities we will revert later more in detail.

We sail down the picturesque and castled Rhine, with its vine-clad hills, with its reminder of Bingen so fondly recalled when

"A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers."

We cannot forget the request which he made:

"Take a message, and a token, to some distant friends of

mine,

For I was born at Bingen,

at Bingen on the Rhine."

No less interesting, on account of legendary associations, is the Mouse Tower on a rock in the midst of the river near Bingen. An Archbishop of Mayence, Hatto 11, burned to the ground a barn crowded with people who had been caught stealing grain during a famine. Their dying shrieks he compared to the squeaking of mice. The legend is that as a punishment for his inhumanity he was eaten alive by hosts of these little assailants, which he could not escape even though he built for himself a tower surrounded by water. They found him in his supposed place of refuge, where he miserably perished from their persistent attacks about 970 A. D. This is a case where a myth teaches an important moral lesson of righteous retribution.

When in Belgium we saw the streets of Brussells crowded on a happy fete day, the ruler of the people joining with them in the festivities. While we have looked with greater satisfaction on other and better monarchs like Edward of England and Alfonso of Spain, and while our eyes

[graphic][merged small][graphic][merged small]

have rested with greater pride on American Presidents like Grant, Harrison, Roosevelt and Taft, we yet were glad to see the Belgian king, not the present Albert (whom we have since seen in Boston) of heroic mould and of glorious fame, but his less worthy predecessor, Leopold, who at our waving of an American flag returned a good-natured and gracious salute: We never could have imagined then that so near in the future there was to be such a tragic fate for the Belgians. The tragedy has been greater than that which occurred on the field of Waterloo in the vicinity, where we went to witness the scene of the final downfall of the first Napoleon. Recalling the "Descent from the Cross," that great painting of Rubens upon which we gazed in Antwerp, we can only hope that it may be emblematic of what is to be the experience of these heroic people, that they are to descend from the cross on which they were so mercilessly crucified, and that they are to rise to a new and more splendid national life. For the determined and desperate stand that they took against the lawless aggressor, they should have the highest praise, and we can repeat the tribute of Julius Caesar in his Commentaries, "Omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae," the bravest of all are the Belgians.

Belgium for centuries will be a historic reminder of the Germans, who have indeed made themselves, as their Kaiser on a notable occasion told them they should do, veritable. Huns. They have been guilty of every infamy. They deliberately started the World War. They made of solemn treaties scraps of paper. They threw to the winds all international law. They became assassins and pirates of the sea, as they prosecuted their submarine warfare, which May 7, 1915 torpedoed without notice the Lusitania with its hundreds of innocent travellers and sent 1198 men and women

« AnteriorContinuar »