“o’er lagoon and dike of sand,‘I am Roland! I am Roland! There is victory in the land.’”
“o’er lagoon and dike of sand,‘I am Roland! I am Roland! There is victory in the land.’”
“o’er lagoon and dike of sand,‘I am Roland! I am Roland! There is victory in the land.’”
“o’er lagoon and dike of sand,
‘I am Roland! I am Roland! There is victory in the land.’”
On the east rise the spires of Westmalle, where in their Trappist convent austere disciples of St. Bruno, garbed in sackcloth and with shaven heads, pass their voiceless lives and keep watch beside the open graves in the orchard. To the south is venerable Mechlin on the many-bridged river Dyle, once famous for such laces as we may still see in the pictures of its immortal son, Frans Hals. Brussels lifts its towers forty miles due south, and stretches its broad roads to Waterloo. And it is there the black forest of Ardennes expands, where St. Hubert, patron of hunters, intercedes for the health of good dogs, and which certain Shakespearean editors have fixed upon as the Forest of Arden of “As You Like It.” Over there lies Namur where the gallant Uncle Toby of “Tristram Shandy” received the painful wound deplored of the Widow Wadman, “before the Gate of St. Nicholas,” as the precise description always ran, “in one of the traverses of the trench, opposite to the salient angle of the demibastion of St. Roch.”
One lingers long and delightedly over this charming panorama of fascinating and storied associations, until presently the great clock beneath us booms the hour of three, and our time is up. We turn regretfully from this toyland country and the gracious, old-fashionedtown—this placid, music-loving, art-reverencing Antwerp, with its many gables and its many rare delights. The friendly moon, a little later, will silver her huddled roofs and serrated fronts, her façades whose fantastic ends will be steps for White Pierrot to go up to his chimney-tops, her quiet squares and quaint, twisting alleys, her solid burgher mansions and vineclad waterman cottages. Serene and chaste, the delicate spire of the magic cathedral will rear its traceried, guardian length from out the deep shadows of little Place Verte and look down all night, with the affection of half a thousand years, on this quaint and merry Antwerp snuggling up to the languid Scheldt.