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Updated: June 27, 2025


They stand high and straight, like church-spires, in my theological garden, lifted up; and some of them have even budded, like Aaron's rod. No church- steeple in a New England village was ever better fitted to draw to it the rising generation on Sunday, than those poles to lift up my beans towards heaven.

As toward dusk I ride into the market square of Alt Oetting, it is noticeable that nearly all the stalls and shops remaining open display nothing but rosaries, crucifixes, and other paraphernalia of the prevailing religion. Through Eastern Bavaria the people seern pre-eminently devotional; church-spires dot the landscape at every point of the compass.

How glad we were to gaze on the earth, smiling through fields of waving corn and laughing with peaceful homes, with the church-spires still pointing heavenward, after so many months of associating with the scars of blackened fields and the running sores festering on earth's bosom, once so fair, where churches had swooned and in lost hope laid their finger in the dust.

The town is at your feet; the fair a city, a Babylon of shops stretches beyond the bridge; the plain, a boundless ocean of green, field and forest, dotted here and there with church-spires and factory-shafts at prodigious distances; and the two broad rivers, bearing the tribute of remote regions from north and south in numberless boats and lighters, and neat gallant steamers; the two streams meeting here at right angles just below the pontoon-bridge where an immense five-domed church of recent construction has been reared to mark and hallow the spot.

The full-risen moon, that dapples the ground beneath the trees, touches the tall church-spires with silver, and slants their loftiness as memory slants grief in long, dark, tapering lines upon the silvered Green. First Look at the World. Our Clarence is now fairly afloat upon the swift tide of Youth. The thrall of teachers is ended, and the audacity of self-resolve is begun.

As the sun goes to the horizon, we have an effect sometimes produced by the best Dutch artists, a wonderful transparent light, in which the landscape looks like a picture, with its church-spires of stone, its windmills, its slender trees, and red-roofed houses. It is a good light and a good hour in which to enter Bruges, that city of the past.

The mingled odours of the country so different from the strong smell of the sea-breeze the sight of the slanting sunbeams glancing through the boles and branches of the venerable trees dotted here and there in clumps along the roadside; of the verdant hedges with their rich clusters of delicate dog-roses and trailing honeysuckle or wild convolvulus; of the groups of sleek cattle feeding in the fields, contemplatively chewing the cud under the shade of some over-hanging tree, or browsing along the roadside; of the knots of rosy, sun-tanned children playing about the village-roads or on the green, and turning to stand open-mouthed and stare at the chaise as we dashed past; of the pretty cottages nestling in a bower of greenery, each with its tiny flower-garden in front, and a thin wreath of blue smoke curling up from its chimney into the still evening air; of the picturesque villages, with their ancient church-spires pointing heavenward; and of the stately country-seats of the gentry, surrounded by noble trees, the growth of centuries, the deer clustered beneath their umbrageous branches, with their spacious flower-terraces and long avenues of limes, arching chestnuts, or venerable oaks, reaching from the house to the distant road, and terminating in snug little ivy- covered lodges and heavy ornamental iron gates with massive stone piers, moss-grown, and surmounted by time-worn and weather-stained stone sculptures of the arms of the family; the drowsy chime of the church- clocks; the barking of dogs; the lowing of cattle; the voices of herdsmen or field-labourers singing as they wended their weary way homeward after the labour and heat of the day the sound softened and mellowed by distance; all combined to render that journey one of the most pleasant and enjoyable I had ever undertaken, notwithstanding the pain and discomfort which I experienced from my wounded arm.

I broke from the charm by which I had been so lingeringly spell-bound, hurried on confusedly, gained the wicket-gate, from which a short flight of stairs descended into the common thoroughfare. And there the every-day life lay again before me. On the opposite side, houses, shops, church-spires; a few steps more, and the bustling streets!

He regarded all human affairs from the heights of religion, as from their church-spires he looked down on the red roofs of Antwerp, on the black roofs of Cologne, on the gray roofs of Strasburg, or on the brown roofs of Basel uplifted for the time above them, not in dissociation from them.

I broke from the charm by which I had been so lingeringly spell-bound, hurried on confusedly, gained the wicket-gate, from which a short flight of stairs descended into the common thoroughfare. And there the every-day life lay again before me. On the opposite side, houses, shops, church-spires; a few steps more, and the bustling streets!

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