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The sacred precincts are enclosed by a high wall, gray, ancient, and luxuriously ivy-grown, and lofty and strong enough for the rampart of a fortress. We went through the gateway and entered the church, which we found in much disarray, and masons at work upon the pavement.
And the description of Squire Allworthy's "venerable" house, with its air of grandeur "that struck you with awe," its position on the sheltered slope of a hill enjoying "a most charming prospect of the valley beneath," its surroundings of a wild and beautiful park, well-watered meadows fed with sheep, the ivy-grown ruins of an old abbey, and far-off hills and sea, preserves, doubtless, the features of the ancient and stately domain owned by the novelist's grandfather.
It was May in the Tuscany Hills; blue distances; a rolling horizon; a sky rimmed like a broken cup; a shallow, winding river, gleaming fitfully in the sun; a compact city in a valley, a city of red-tiled roofs, of domes and towers and palaces, of ruined ivy-grown walls and battlements; shades of Michelangelo and Dante and Machiavelli, the Borgias and the Medicis: Florence, the city of flowers.
Externally there is no opening for half the height; then there are two pointed windows with a considerable space between; above these in the middle is a large loggia with two pointed doors, at the sides quadrangular windows, and higher up, beneath the eaves, four more small window-openings. Some of the towers are ivy-grown. In the church in the piazza is a S. Sebastian ascribed to Schiavone.
The ivy-grown, ancient bridge, with its high arch, through which we had a picture of the river and the green banks beyond, was absolutely the most picturesque object, in a quiet and gentle way, that ever blest my eyes. Bonny Doon, with its wooded banks, and the boughs dipping into the water!
The pictures that Van Dyck then painted are there now in the same old ivy-grown, moss-covered church at Saventhem. The next time you are in Brussels it will pay you to walk out and see them. One of the pictures is called "Saint Martin Dividing His Cloak With Two Beggars." The Saint is modestly represented by Van Dyck himself, seated astride the beautiful horse that Rubens gave him.
"I wonder whether she is as lovely as she is said to be?" said Manutoli, as they drove out beyond the crumbling and ivy-grown brick wall, which had helped to repel the attack of Odoacer the Goth; but which had, some thirteen hundred years ago, failed to keep out the mischief brought into the city by the comedian Empress Theodora, whose beauty had promoted her from the stage to the throne.
I still recall the autumnal melancholy of that queer, neglected-looking place, in which I had never been before, and which I have never revisited a memory of walking along narrow garden paths beside queer leaf-choked artificial channels of water under yellow-tinted trees, of rustic bridges going nowhere in particular, and of a kind of brickwork ruined castle, greatly decayed and ivy-grown, in which we sat for a long time looking out upon a lawn and a wide gravel path leading to a colossal frontage of conservatory.
I am getting tired of antiquity. It is certainly less interesting in the long run than novelty; and so I was well content with the fresh, warm, red hue of the modern house, and the unworn outline of its walls, and its cheerful, large windows; and was willing that the old ivy-grown ruins should exist now only to contrast with the modernisms. These ancient walls, by the by, are of immense thickness.
One bright May morning some sixteen years later, the golden sunshine was just putting forth its first crimson rays, lighting up the ivy-grown turrets of Whitestone Hall, and shining upon a little white cottage nestling in a bower of green leaves far to the right of it, where dwelt John Brooks, the overseer of the Hurlhurst plantation.
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