The Personality of American CitiesHungerford, Edward
History
The Personality of American Cities
Hungerford, Edward
Cities and towns -- United States; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
Our eyes follow his pointing hand--to a long, low building on the south
side of the little square. It is very old and exceeding quaint. Although
built of the graystone of Montreal, brought by the soot of many years to
almost a dead black, it seems of another land as well as of another
time. Its quaint belfry with delicate clock-face and out-set hands is
redolent of the south of France or Spain or even Italy. It does not seem
a part and parcel of Our Lady of the Snows--and yet it is.
"You know--the Seminary of St. Sulpice," says our Canadian friend. "It
was the original owner of the rich island of Montreal. No one knows its
wealth today, even after it has parted with many of its fee-holds. It
still holds title to thousands of acres and no one save the Gentleman of
the Corporation of St. Sulpice, themselves, knows the wealth of the
institution. To say that it is the richest ecclesiastical institution of
the Americas is not enough, for here is an organization that for
coherency, wealth and strength surpasses Standard Oil and forms the
chief financial support of the strongest church in the world."
And this time we feel that our acquaintance of the Place d'Armes is not
by any chance over-stepping the mark. In the quaint little Seminary that
stands in the half-day shadow of the second largest church on the
continent--a church that it easily builded in the first third of the
nineteenth century from its accumulated wealth--there centers much of
the mystery of Montreal, a mystery which to the stranger takes concrete
form in the high walls along the crowded streets, in whispered rumors of
this force or that working within the politics of the city, in the
so-called Nationalist movement, and flaunts itself in rival displays of
Union Jack and the historic Tricolor of France. There is little of
mystery in the outer form of the Seminary. The quiet folk who live
within those very, very old walls are hospitality itself--even though
their ascetic living is of the hardest, crudest sort. The only bed and
carpeted room within the building is reserved for the occasional visits
of bishop, or even higher church authority. But hidden from the street
by the earliest part of the Seminary--almost unchanged since its
erection in 1710--and enclosed by a quadrangle of the fortress-like
stone buildings of the institution, is a most delicious garden with
old-fashioned summer flowers and quaint statues of favored saints set in
its shaded place. We remember a garden of the same sort at the mission
of Santa Barbara, in California. These two are the most satisfactory
gardens that we have ever seen. And it is from the rose-bushes in the
Seminary of Montreal that one gets a full idea of the size and beauty of
the exterior of the parish church of Notre Dame. Like so many of the
cathedrals of Europe, it is so set as to have no satisfactory view-point
from the street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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