Again They Made The Whole Circuit
Of The Train, And Then We Saw The Guard Coming, With Rather A Fierce,
Determined Air, Straight To Our Door.
He opened it very decidedly, and
ordered the gentleman to enter.
He entered, cigar and all. His friend
followed.
"Well," said H., in English, "I suppose he must either smoke or die."
"Ah, yes," I replied, "for the sake of saving his life we will even
let him smoke."
"Hope the tobacco is good," added H.; and we went on reading our
"Villette," which was very amusing just then. The gentleman had his
match already lighted, and was just in the act of puffing
preliminarily when H. first spoke. I thought I saw a peculiar
expression on his friend's face. He dropped a word or two in German,
as if quite incidentally, and I soon observed that the smoking made
small progress. Pie kept the cigar in his mouth, it is true, for a
while, just to show he would smoke if he chose; but his whiffs were
fewer and fainter every minute; and after reading several chapters,
happening to cast my eye that way, the cigar had disappeared. Not long
after the friend, sitting opposite me, addressed W. in _good
English_, and they were soon well agoing in a friendly discussion
of our route. The winged word had hit the mark that time.
We passed the night in an agreeable hotel, Roi de Prusse, at Cassel.
By the way, it occurred to us that this was where the Hessians came
from in the old revolutionary times.
Tuesday, August 16. A long, dull ride from Cassel to Dusseldorf.
Wednesday, August 17. Whittridge came at breakfast. The same mellow,
friendly, good-humored voice, and genial soul, I had loved years ago
in the heart of Indiana. We had a brief festival of talk about old
times, art, artists, and friends, and the tide of time rolled in and
swept us asunder. Success to his pencil in the enchanted glades of
Germany! America will yet be proud of his landscapes, as Italy of
Claude, or England of Turner.
Ho for Anvers! (Antwerp.) Through Aix-la-Chapelle, Liege, Malines,
till nine at night.
Thursday, August 18. What gnome's cave is this Antwerp, where I have
been hearing such strange harmonies in the air all night? We drive to
the cathedral, whose tower reminded Napoleon of Mechlin lace. What a
shower of sprinkling music drops comes from the sky above us! We must
go up and see about this. We spiralize through a tubular stairway to
an immense height - a tube of stone, like a Titanic organ pipe, filled
with waves of sound pouring down like a deluge. Undulations
tremendous, yet not intolerable: we soon learned their origin.
Reaching a small door, I turned aside, and came where the great bell
was hung, which twenty men were engaged in ringing. It was a
_fete_ day. I crept inside the frame, and stood actually under
the colossal mass, as it swung like a world in its spheric chime. A
new sense was developed, such as I had heard of the deaf possessing. I
seemed existing in a new medium. I _felt_ the sound in my lungs,
in my bones, on all my nerves to the minutest fibre, and yet it did
not stupefy nor stun me with a harsh clangor. It was _deep_,
DEEP. It was an abyss, gorgeously illuminated of velvet softness, in
which I floated. The sound was fluid like water about me. I closed my
eyes. Where was I? Had some prodigious monster swallowed me, and, like
another Jonah, had I "gone down beneath the bottoms of the mountains"?
I escaped from that perilous womb of sound, and ascended still higher.
There was the mystery of that nocturnal minstrelsy. Seventy-three
bells in chromatic diapason - with their tinkling, ringing, tolling,
knolling peal! Was not that a chime? a chime of chimes? And all these
goblin hammers, like hands and feet of sprites, rising and falling, by
magic, by hidden mechanism.
Of all German cactus blossoms this is the most ethereal. What head
conceived those harmonies, so ghostlike? Every ten minutes, if you lie
wakeful, they wind you up in a net of silver wirework, and swing you
in the clouds; and the next time they swing you higher, and the next
higher, and when the round hour is full the giant bell strikes at the
gate of heaven to bring you home!
But this is dreaming. Fie, fie! Let us come down to pictures, masses,
and common sense. We came down. We entered the room, and sat before
the Descent from the Cross, where the dead body of Jesus seems an
actual reality before you. The waves of the high mass came rolling in,
muffled by intervening walls, columns, corridors, in a low, mysterious
murmur. Then organ, orchestra, and choir, with rising voices urged the
mighty acclaim, till the waves seemed beating down the barriers upon
us. The combined excitement of the chimes, the painting, the music,
was too much. I seemed to breathe ether. Treading on clouds, as it
were, I entered the cathedral, and the illusion vanished.
Friday, August 19. Antwerp to Paris.
Saturday, August 20. H. and I take up our abode at the house of M.
Belloc, where we find every thing so pleasant, that we sigh to think
how soon we must leave these dear friends. The rest of our party are
at the Hotel Bedford.
LETTER XLVII.
Antwerp.
MY DEAR: -
Of all quaint places this is one of the most charming. I have been
rather troubled that antiquity has fled before me where I have gone.
It is a fatality of travelling that the sense of novelty dies away, so
that we do not realize that we are seeing any thing extraordinary. I
wanted to see something as quaint as Nuremberg in Longfellow's poem,
and have but just found it. These high-gabled old Flemish houses, nine
steps to each gable!
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