end one sees innumerable masses of grey weather-beaten stones in every
grotesque angle of incidence and coincidence, but all rude and mean,
covered with mystic Hebrew letters and half-buried amid long grass,
nettles, and weeds. The place looks exactly as if originally a
collection of dunghills or, perhaps, of excavated earth, left to its
natural course after the corpses had been thrown in and the rude
billets set over them. The economy of the race is visible in their
measure for the dead, and contrasts wonderfully with the roominess
and delicate adornment of German churchyards in general. The hoar
antiquity of the place is increased by a wilderness of alders which
grow up around the walls and amidst the stones, twisted, tangled,
stunted, desolately old and yet renewing their youth, a true type of
the scattered, bruised, and peeled, yet ineradicable Israel itself."
An incident at Novi, between Genoa and Milan, is thus described:
"I had strolled into a vineyard behind the town, quite lonely and
crowned with one cottage. On one of the secluded paths I found a little
girl lying on the grass, with her face turned up to the sun and fast
asleep. The breeze played beautifully with her hair, and her dress
fluttered and rustled, but there she lay, and nothing but the heaving
of her frame, which could hardly be distinguished from the agitation
of the wind, proved that she was only asleep. I stood gazing for a
long while, thinking of the Providence that watched alike over the
child in its slumberings and the pilgrim in his wanderings; and as
I saw her companions playing at no great distance, I left the spot
without awakening the absent little one. As I was passing the cottage
door, however, I was overtaken by the mother in evident agitation. She
pointed along the path I had come by, as if she feared her child had
wandered to the highway or been lost amid the wild brushwood that grew
on that side of the vineyard. I soon made her understand that the
_piccolina_ was just behind her, and waited till she bounded away and
returned with the crying thing in her arms, loading it with gentle
reproaches and me with warm expressions of gratitude."
At Milan it must be admitted that he goes into raptures over the
Cathedral, but one is glad to note that he reserves an ample tribute
of enthusiasm for the old church of St. Ambrose: "In the cloister of
St. Ambrose I saw the famous cypress doors which the saint closed
against Theodosius, time-worn but solid; the brazen serpent, the fine
pulpit with the bas-relief of the Agape, and the veritable Episcopal
chair of marble, with solid back and sides, and lions embossed at the
corners, in which he sat in the councils of his presbyters. It is
almost the only relic I have done any honour to. I knelt down and
kissed it, and forgot for the time that I was both Protestant and
Presbyterian."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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