Our Fathers Have Told Us: Part I. The Bible of AmiensRuskin, John
History
Our Fathers Have Told Us: Part I. The Bible of Amiens
Ruskin, John
Cathédrale d'Amiens; France -- History
20. In case you have not a forenoon to spare, nor eyesight to waste,
this much of merely necessary abstract must serve you,--that from the
Drachenfels and its six brother felsen, eastward, trending to the north,
there runs and spreads a straggling company of gnarled and mysterious
craglets, jutting and scowling above glens fringed by coppice, and
fretful or musical with stream; the crags, in pious ages, mostly
castled, for distantly or fancifully Christian purposes;--the glens,
resonant of woodmen, or burrowed at the sides by miners, and invisibly
tenanted farther, underground, by gnomes, and above by forest and other
demons. The entire district, clasping crag to crag, and guiding dell to
dell, some hundred and fifty miles (with intervals) between the Dragon
mountain above Rhine, and the Rosin mountain, 'Hartz' shadowy still to
the south of the riding grounds of Black Brunswickers of indisputable
bodily presence;--shadowy anciently with 'Hercynian' (hedge, or fence)
forest, corrupted or coinciding into Hartz, or Rosin forest, haunted by
obscurely apparent foresters of at least resinous, not to say
sulphurous, extraction.
21. A hundred and fifty miles east to west, say half as much north to
south--about a thousand square miles in whole--of metalliferous,
coniferous, and Ghostiferous mountain, fluent, and diffluent for us,
both in mediaeval and recent times, with the most Essential oil of
Turpentine, and Myrrh or Frankincense of temper and imagination, which
may be typified by it, producible in Germany; especially if we think
how the more delicate uses of Rosin, as indispensable to the
Fiddle-bow, have developed themselves, from the days of St. Elizabeth
of Marburg to those of St. Mephistopheles of Weimar.
22. As far as I know, this cluster of wayward cliff and dingle has no
common name as a group of hills; and it is quite impossible to make
out the diverse branching of it in any maps I can lay hand on: but we
may remember easily, and usefully, that it is _all_ north of the
Maine,--that it rests on the Drachenfels at one end, and tosses itself
away to the morning light with a concave swoop, up to the Hartz,
(Brocken summit, 3700 feet above sea, nothing higher): with one
notable interval for Weser stream, of which presently.
23. We will call this, in future, the chain, or company, of
the Enchanted mountains; and then we shall all the more easily join on
the Giant mountains, Riesen-Gebirge, when we want them; but these are
altogether higher, sterner, and not yet to be invaded; the nearer
ones, through which our road lies, we might perhaps more aptly call
the Goblin mountains; but that would be scarcely reverent to St.
Elizabeth, nor to the numberless pretty chatelaines of towers, and
princesses of park and glen, who have made German domestic manners
sweet and exemplary, and have led their lightly rippling and
translucent lives down the glens of ages, until enchantment becomes,
perhaps, too canonical in the Almanach de Gotha.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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