we follow the white fleets as they sail away towards the south, ever
replaced by new armadas surging up and over the northern horizon. At
another time in range beyond range of snowy clouds, we see rise before
us the Delectable Mountains beyond which is the Land of Beulah where the
shining ones go to and fro as messengers to the Celestial City.
It is said that an eye unused to the telescope cannot see the canals on
the planet Mars, but that through the same instrument they are plainly
visible to an eye trained to such observation. Sometimes, when the
clouds have hung in white masses over the city, I have been eager to see
what was hidden by those luminous walls, but my untrained eyes could not
pierce them. Day after day, however, I became more familiar with them.
Others before now, without journeying like Columbus to prove the truth
of his visions, have, even by their own firesides, enjoyed Castles in
the Air and Châteaux and great possessions in Spain. In like manner as
the breeze moved the silver edges of the clouds, I had unexpectedly
through the rifts views of strange lands and fair cities which I had
never before seen or heard of. As they were indeed lovely, in all haste
I tried to make rapid notes of them to prove the truth of my strange
experience.
Far to the north over Homewood, a pile of mountainous clouds was rent
for a short space by the breeze, and disclosed a Minster in a meadow
land. Its name seemed to be Upthorpe-cum-Regis. Its tower rose before me
over the busy life of the town and looked down on the mansion of the
Squire and the house of the Dean. Close around the walls of the Minster,
indeed within sound of its prayers and anthems, were clustered the
graves of the dead,--the former generations who had made the life of the
town and who built the church and worshipped at its altar. It was a town
in which the characters described by Trollope or George Eliot or Jane
Austen would have felt themselves at home.
Again when a sunset was filling the western sky with "the incomparable
pomp of eve," a break in the clouds above the gilded towers of Cardinal
Gibbons's Cathedral disclosed an Italian town on a lovely lake shore.
Boats with colored sails lined the Riva of Ranconezzo. Two piazzas
teeming with life surrounded the Duomo or Cathedral and from them there
were wide views over lake and mountain scenery. It appears that in the
long ago, the Cardinal Schalchi-Visconti was the benefactor of this
town, and there on the hillside, tree embowered, was his villa with its
little port for the lake boats. His tomb I also saw, not in the Duomo,
but in the Bramantesque Church of Santa Prassede, a building resembling
the many small churches in northern Italy due to the refined influence
of Bramante. In my dreaming I entered the church, and found that the
great Cardinal lies beneath a tomb carved by Mino da Fiesole on the
north side of Santa Prassede.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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