Canada -- Description and travel -- Fiction; Honeymoons -- Fiction; New York (State) -- Description and travel -- Fiction
The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top with the names of those who
have climbed it, and most of these are Americans, who flock in great
numbers to Canada in summer. They modify its hotel life, and the objects
of interest thrive upon their bounty. Our friends met them at every turn,
and knew them at a glance from the native populations, who are also
easily distinguishable from each other. The French Canadians are nearly
always of a peasant-like commonness, or where they rise above this have a
bourgeois commonness of face and manner, and the English Canadians are to
be known from the many English sojourners by the effort to look much more
English than the latter. The social heart of the colony clings fast to
the mother-country, that is plain, whatever the political tendency may
be; and the public monuments and inscriptions celebrate this affectionate
union.
At the English cathedral the effect is deepened by the epitaphs of those
whose lives were passed in the joint service of England and her loyal
child; and our travellers, whatever their want of sympathy with the
sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty in that attitude of proud
reverence. Here, at least, was a people not cut off from its past, but
holding, unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist for us only in
history. It gave a glamour of olden time to the new land; it touched the
prosaic democratic present with the waning poetic light of the
aristocratic and monarchical tradition. There was here and there a title
on the tablets, and there was everywhere the formal language of loyalty
and of veneration for things we have tumbled into the dust. It is a
beautiful church, of admirable English Gothic; if you are so happy, you
are rather curtly told you may enter by a burly English figure in some
kind of sombre ecclesiastical drapery, and within its quiet precincts you
may feel yourself in England if you like,--which, for my part, I do not.
Neither did our friends enjoy it so much as the Church of the Jesuits,
with its more than tolerable painting, its coldly frescoed ceiling, its
architectural taste of subdued Renaissance, and its black-eyed
peasant-girl telling her beads before a side altar, just as in the
enviably deplorable countries we all love; nor so much even as the Irish
cathedral which they next visited. That is a very gorgeous cathedral
indeed, painted and gilded 'a merveille', and everywhere stuck about with
big and little saints and crucifixes, and pictures incredibly bad--but
for those in the French cathedral. There is, of course, a series
representing Christ's progress to Calvary; and there was a very tattered
old man,--an old man whose voice had been long ago drowned in whiskey,
and who now spoke in a ghostly whisper,--who, when he saw Basil's eye
fall upon the series, made him go the round of them, and tediously
explained them.
"Why did you let that old wretch bore you, and then pay him for it?"
Isabel asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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