United States or Suriname ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The earth has a cultivated aspect an aspect of civilisation: for these high plateaux the tierras templadas are the seat of Mexican civilisation. Here are the towns the great cities, with their rich cathedrals and convents here dwells the bulk of the population. Here are whole villages of such huts, inhabited by the dark-skinned descendants of the ancient Aztecs. Fertile fields are around me.
Over the mantelpiece hung the portrait of the girls' father, a long serious face, not unlike Wordsworth's face in outline, and bearing a strong resemblance to Catherine; a line of silhouettes adorned the mantelpiece; on the walls were prints of Winchester and Worcester Cathedrals, photographs of Greece, and two old-fashioned engravings of Dante and Milton; while a bookcase, filled apparently with the father's college books and college prizes and the favorite authors mostly poets, philosophers, and theologians of his later years, gave a final touch of habitableness to the room.
In a small way it has always existed in certain places, in towns, where the jackdaw is associated in our minds with cathedrals and church towers where he is the "ecclesiastical daw"; but the modern wider toleration is due to the character, the personality, of the bird itself, which is more or less like that of all the members of the corvine family, with the exception of the rook, who always tries his best to be an honest, useful citizen; but it is not precisely the same.
In the inspired and inspiring paintings that crowned the altars of the churches and the cathedrals in which he ministered, Glastonbury first studied art; and it was as he glided along the solemn shade of those Gothic aisles, gazing on the brave groining of the vaulted roofs, whose deep and sublime shadows so beautifully contrasted with the sparkling shrines and the delicate chantries below, that he first imbibed that passion for the architecture of the Middle Ages that afterwards led him on many a pleasant pilgrimage with no better companions than a wallet and a sketch-book.
Upwards of six hundred houses, and almost all the public buildings, the cathedrals of St. John and St.
The same applies also to Brittany, which is treated elsewhere, with this proviso, that the tourist afoot or awheel is far better equipped than he who has to depend upon steam and the rail, two at least of Brittany's cathedrals being "off the line." The Cathedral at Evreux is another of those edifices which gives one its best impression when first seen upon entering the city.
"At Laon they are more especially strange. With their light columns, here thrust forward and there standing back, they suggest a series of shelves piled up in a hurry, crowned merely by a platform, over which lowing oxen look down. "The two towers at Amiens, built, like those of the Cathedrals at Rouen and at Bourges, at different periods, do not match.
Thus to make the acquaintance of that grandest and most astonishing of old cathedrals, is to do so under the best and most suitable conditions: very different from the guide and cicerone business, which belongs to later hours of the day.
Then I observed the rare, almost archaic phrases which he liked to employ at certain points, where a hidden flow of harmony, a prelude contained and concealed in the work itself would animate and elevate his style; and it was at such points as these, too, that he would begin to speak of the "vain dream of life," of the "inexhaustible torrent of fair forms," of the "sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving," of the "moving effigies which ennoble for all time the charming and venerable fronts of our cathedrals"; that he would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by the use of marvellous imagery, to the inspiration of which I would naturally have ascribed that sound of harping which began to chime and echo in my ears, an accompaniment to which that imagery added something ethereal and sublime.
Out of the gates of the morning poured a light which glorified the palaces and pyramids, purged and purified the afternoon's inscrutable clefts, swept away the shadows of the mesas, and bathed that broad, deep world of mighty mountains, stately spars of rock, sculptured cathedrals and alabaster terraces in an artist's dream of color.
Word Of The Day