Rambles in an Old City

Rambles in an Old City - comprising antiquarian, historical, biographical and political associations

Who that has ever looked upon the strange conglomerations of architecture that line the thoroughfares of an ancient city, bearing trace of a touch from the hand of every age, from centuries far remote,or watched the busy scenes of modern every-day life, surrounded by solemnly majestic, or quaintly grim old witnesses of our nations infancy,but has felt the Poetry of History that lies treasured up in the chronicles of an Old City? We may not all be archologists, we may many of us feel little sympathy with the love of accumulating time-worn, moth-eaten relics of ages passed away, still less may we desire to see the resuscitation of dead forms, customs or laws, which we believe to p. 2have been advances upon prior existing institutions, living their term of natural life in the season appointed for them, and yielding in their turn to progressions more suited to the growing wants of a growing people; but there are few minds wholly indifferent to the associations of time and place, or that are not conscious of some reverence for the links connecting the present with the past, to be found in the many noble and stupendous works of ancient art, yet lingering amongst us, massive evidences of lofty thoughts and grand conceptions, which found expression in the works of mens hands, when few other modes existed of embodying the imaginations of the mind. It is not now my purpose to draw comparisons between the appeals thus made through the outward senses to the spirituality of our nature, and the varied other and more subtle means employed in later days, to awaken our feelings of veneration and devotion, but it may be observed in passing, that amid the floods of change that have swept across our countrys history, it is scarcely possible but that some good should have been lost among the dbris of decayed and shattered institutions. We have now to take a sweeping glance at the general outline of the place that has been chosen as the nucleus from which to spin our web, of light and perhaps fanciful associations. A desultory ramble through the streets p. 3and bye-ways of an old city, that owns six-and-thirty parish churches, the ghosts of about twenty more defunct, the remains of four large friaries and a nunnery, some twenty or thirty temples of worship flourishing under the divers names and forms of dissent, two Roman branches of the Catholic Church, a Jewish synagogue, a hospital, museum, libraries, and institutions of every possible name, and refuges for blind, lame, halt, deaf, incurable, and diseased in mind, body, or estate; that is sprinkled with factories, bounded by crumbling ruins of old rampart walls, and studded with broken and mutilated bastion towers,brings into view a series of objects so heterogeneous in order and character, that to arrange the ideas suggested by them to the mind or memory, is a task of no slight difficulty. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 33724
Author: Madders, Susan Swain
Release Date: Sep 14, 2010
Format: eBook
Language: English