A Baptist Abroad: Travels and Adventures of Europe and all Bible LandsWhittle, Walter Andrew
Religion
A Baptist Abroad: Travels and Adventures of Europe and all Bible Lands
Whittle, Walter Andrew
Europe -- Description and travel; Middle East -- Description and travel
Now that we have reached Melrose, let us go at once to the old Abbey,
and view that ruined pile in which repose the body of Douglass and
the heart of Bruce, and around which the bard of Abbotsford loved to
linger. This old church, or abbey, which for hundreds and hundreds
of years resounded with the songs and prayers of monks and Catholic
priests, was demolished by the Protestants in the time of the
Reformation, and now serves only as the dwelling-place of blind bats
and hooting owls. After spending three hours in and around the Abbey,
and regretting that we cannot linger three days, we leave, feeling that
we can fully appreciate, and heartily adopt the sentiment expressed in
the second canto of “The Lay of the Last Minstrel:”
“If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright.
Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
And, home returning, soothly swear,
Was never seen so sad and fair.”
[Illustration: MELROSE ABBEY.]
We now retrace our steps toward Gallashields; and, on reaching there,
are met by the Rev. Mr. Thompson, a Baptist preacher, who takes us to
his house, and treats us so kindly that I really regret my inability to
accept his kind invitation to remain until Sunday and preach for him.
I sincerely regret that my stay in Scotland has ended. I am loath to
leave. I have walked two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles
through the Highlands. I have viewed the whole country through a veil
of poesy which the hands of Scott and Burns have thrown over it. To me,
it is indeed “Bonnie Scotland;” and in leaving it I can but say:
“Farewell to the land where the clouds love to rest,
Like the shroud of the dead on the mountains’ cold breast;
To the cataracts’ roar, where the eagles reply,
And the lakes their broad bosoms expand to the sky.”
The night passes; morning comes. The day is bright and beautiful.
I now bid adieu to bonnie Scotland, and set my face, for the first
time, toward merry England. It is Saturday. Hence, I go direct to
Manchester, so as to be there on Sunday. Manchester has almost a
million inhabitants. It is the greatest cotton-manufacturing city in
the world. The great English Exposition was opened in Manchester by the
Prince and Princess of Wales, a few days ago, and will not close for
some weeks yet. I have attended exhibitions in New Orleans, Atlanta,
Louisville, Washington City, Philadelphia and Boston, and the main
difference between an American exposition and an English one is that
in America we make a specialty of fruits, seeds, agricultural products
and implements, fine wood, valuable timbers, gold and silver ore, etc.,
while in England the specialties are emblems of royalty, relics of
antiquity, and products of the loom and spindle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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