A Quantity Of Banners Literally Hung In Tatters, Dropping To
Pieces With Age.
Here were the middle ages all standing.
Then we passed up to a grand hall, which is now being restored with
great taste after the style of that day - a long, lofty room, with an
arched roof, and a gallery on one side, and beyond, a row of
Romanesque arched windows, commanding a view of the country around.
Having finished the tour of this part, we went back, ascended an old,
rude staircase, and were ushered into Luther's Patmos, about ten or
twelve feet square. The window looked down the rocky sides into an
ocean of seething mist. I opened it, but could see nothing of all
those scenes he describes so graphically from this spot. I thought of
his playful letter on the "Diet of the Rooks," but there was not a
rook at hand to illustrate antiquity. There was his bedstead and
footstool, a mammoth vertebra, and his writing table. A sculptured
chair, the back of which is carved into a cherub's head, bending
forward and shadowing with its wings the head of the sitter, was said
to be of the time of Luther, but not _his_ chair. There were some
of his books, and a rude, iron-studded clothes press.
Thus ended for me the Lutheran pilgrimage. I had now been
perseveringly to all the shrines, and often inquired of myself whether
our conceptions are helped by such visitations. I decided the question
in the affirmative; that they are, if from the dust of the present we
can recreate the past, and bring again before us the forms as they
then lived, moved, and had their being.
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