Liege, Built As It Is Exactly On
The Edge Of The Ardennes, Is Far The Most Finely Situated Of Any
Great City In Belgium.
To appreciate this properly you should not
fail to climb the long flight of steps - in effect they seem
interminable, but they are really about six hundred - that mounts
endlessly from near the Cellular Prison to a point by the side of
the Citadelle Pierreuse.
Looking down hence on the city,
especially under certain atmospheric conditions - I am thinking of
a showery day at Easter - one is reminded of the lines by poor John
Davidson:
"The adventurous sun took Heaven by storm;
Clouds scattered largesses of rain;
The sounding cities, rich and warm,
Smouldered and glittered in the plain."
It is not often that one is privileged to look down so directly,
and from so commanding a natural height, on to so vast and busy a
city - those who like this kind of comparison have styled it the
Belgian Birmingham - lying unrolled so immediately, like a map,
beneath our feet.
From Liege, if you like, you may penetrate the Ardennes - I do not
know whether Shakespeare was thinking in "As You Like It" of this
woodland or of his own Warwickshire forest of Arden; perhaps he
thought of both - immediately by way of Spa and the valley of the
Vesdre, or by the valleys of the Ourthe and of its tributary the
Ambleve; or you may still cling for a little while to the fringe
of the Ardennes, which is also the fringe of the industrial
country, and explore the valley of the Meuse westward, past Huy
and Namur, to Dinant. Huy has a noble collegiate church of Notre
Dame, the chancel towers of which (found again as far away as
Como) are suggestive of Rhenish influence, but strikes one as
rather dusty and untidy in itself. Namur, on the contrary, we have
already noted with praise, though it has nothing of real
antiquity. The valley of the Meuse is graced everywhere at
intervals with fantastic piles of limestone cliff, and certainly,
in a proper light, is pretty; but there is far too much quarrying
and industrialism between Liege and Namur, and far too many
residential villas along the banks between Namur and Dinant,
altogether to satisfy those who have high ideals of scenery.
Wordsworth, in a prefatory note to a sonnet that was written in
1820, and at a date when these signs of industrialism were
doubtless less obtrusive, says: "The scenery on the Meuse pleases
one more, upon the whole, than that of the Rhine, though the river
itself is much inferior in grandeur"; but even he complains that
the scenery is "in several places disfigured by quarries, whence
stones were taken for the new fortifications." Dinant, in
particular, has an exceptionally grand cliff; but the summit is
crowned (or was) by an ugly citadel, and the base is thickly
clustered round with houses (not all, by any means, mediaeval and
beautiful) in a way that calls to mind the High Tor at Matlock
Bath.
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