Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Old Cambridge and New
The ensuing days were devoted to our search. But vacation had emptied the colleges of both students and fellows. Profound stillness reigned supreme about the cloisters and those magnificent quadrangles, which impress Americans the more that our climate with its heavy snows and extreme heat in summer little favors this mode of construction. We visited, in the course of our pilgrimage, the seventeen different colleges, from Peter's of 1284 to Downing's of this nineteenth century, delighted with their nobly preportioned refectories and combination rooms, where the fellows take their wine and walnuts after their repasts in hall, libraries lined with quaint old oaken book-cases and ancient volumes, chapels most of them of moderate di mensions, a few more magnificent if not equalling King's, with its fretted roof and painted glass. Everywhere the eye ranged from one object of beauty to another, impressed but never sated, every step presenting something more beautiful yet for admiration. Pictures and statues of familiar worthies, win dows richly dight with designs, devotional or symbolical, in exquisite tint and tone, shedding their dim religious light on oaken wainscot and marble ?oor, delicate carvings in wood by Gibbons, elsewhere to be found but nowhere more airy and fanciful than at Cambridge, specimens of the oldest writings extant, in good preservation, as also manuscripts of Bacon, Milton, Newton, with the sense that here have moved and worked hosts of famous men Whose names are familiar as household words, the very communion of genius, combined to render a Visit to their shrine a blessed pilgrimage.
Among the great numbers of separate edifices, ecclesiastical and collegiate, filling the place, the number of very venerable structures is not large and is constantly diminishing, giving way to new ranges of buildings or to new stone walls modernizing the old ones. But still there were here and there remains of mediaeval architecture in battlements and towers and richly mul lioned windows, possessed of beauty not alone because strange and ancient, from historic or other associations, but from varied symmetry and combina tion of delicate elaboration with broad masses and rude material. It is not to be denied that time with its weather stains, crumbled lines, its moss and lich ens, its mantling ivy which has a peculiar lustre and luxuriance in the humid atmosphere of England, has a potent spell of its own, but still besides are found at every turn in gatehouses and Cloisters, buttress and battlement, marks of that taste which in the days of Plantagenet and Tudor monarchs erected for divine worship, conventual or collegiate uses, edifices never since surpassed in power to please the eye or kindle the imagination.
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