WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW 作者：华盛顿·欧文投票推荐加入书签留言反馈

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When I behold, with deep astonishment,

 To famous Westminster how there resorte,

 Living in brasse or stoney mo,

 The princes and the worthies of all sorte;

 Doe not I see reformde nobilitie,

 Without pt, or pride, or ostentation,

 And looke upon offenselesse majesty,

 Naked of pomp or earthly domination?

 And holay-game of a paione

 tents the quiet now and silent sprites,

 Whome all the world which late they stood upon

 Could not tent nor quench their appetites.

 Life is a frost of cold felicitie,

 Ah the thaw of all our vanitie.

 CHRISTOLEROS EPIGRAMS, BY T. B. 1598.

 ON one of those sober and rather melancholy days iter part of autumhe shadows of m and evening almost miogether, and throw a gloom over the dee of the year, I passed several hours in rambling about Westminster Abbey. There was something genial to the season in the mournful magni?ce of the old pile, and as I passed its threshold it seemed like stepping bato the regions of antiquity and losing myself among the shades of fes.

 I entered from the inner court of Westminster School, through a long, low, vaulted passage that had an almost subterranean look, being dimly lighted in one part by circular perforations in the massive walls. Through this dark avenue I had a distant view of the cloisters, with the ?gure of an old verger in his blaoving along their shadowy vaults, and seeming like a spectre from one of the neighb tombs. The approach to the abbey through these gloomy monastic remains prepares the mind for its solemn plation. The cloisters still retain something of the quiet and seclusion of former days. The gray walls are discolored by damps and crumbling with age; a coat of hoary moss has gathered over the inscriptions of the mural mos, and obscured the deaths heads and other funeral emblems. The sharp touches of the chisel are gone from the rich tracery of the arches; the roses which adorhe keystones have lost their leafy beauty; everything bears marks of the gradual dilapidations of time, which yet has something toug and pleasing in its very decay.

 The sun down a yellow autumnal ray into the square of the cloisters, beaming upon a sty plot of grass in the tre, and lighting up an angle of the vaulted passage with a kind of dusky splendor. From between the arcades the eye glanced up to a bit of blue sky or a passing cloud, and beheld the sun-gilt pinnacles of the abbey t into the azure heaven.

 As I paced the cloisters, sometimes plating this mingled picture of glory and decay, and sometimes endeav to decipher the inscriptions oombstones whied the pavemeh my feet, my eye was attracted to three ?gures rudely carved in relief, but nearly worn away by the footsteps of many geions. They were the ef?gies of three of the early abbots; the epitaphs were entirely effaced; the names alone remained, having no doubt been renewed in later times (Vitalis. Abbas.

 1082, and Gislebertus Crispinus. Abbas. 1114, and Laurentius.

 Abbas. 1176). I remained some little while, musing over these casual relics of antiquity thus left like wrecks upon this distant shore of time, telling no tale but that such beings had been and had perished, teag no moral but the futility of that pride which hopes still to exaage in its ashes and to live in an inscription. A little longer, and even these faint records will be obliterated and the mo will cease to be a memorial.

 Whilst I was yet looking down upon the gravestones I was roused by the sound of the abbey clock, reverberating from buttress to buttress and eg among the cloisters. It is almost startling to hear this warning of departed time sounding among the tombs and telling the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward towards the grave. I pursued my walk to an arched door opening to the it>..t>or of the abbey. Oerihe magnitude of the building breaks fully upon the mind, trasted with the vaults of the cloisters. The eyes gaze with wo clustered ns of gigantic dimensions, with arches springing from them to su amazi, and man wandering about their bases, shrunk into insigni? parison with his own handiwork. The spaciousness and gloom of this vast edi?ce produce a profound and mysterious awe. We step cautiously and softly about, as if fearful of disturbing the hallowed silence of the tomb, while every footfall whispers along the walls and chatters among the sepulchres, making us more sensible of the quiet we have interrupted.

 It seems as if the awful nature of the place presses down upon the soul and hushes the beholder into noiseless reverence. We feel that we are surrounded by the gregated bones of the great men of past times, who have ?lled history with their deeds and the earth with their renown.

 A almost provokes a smile at the vanity of human ambition to see how they are crowded together and jostled in the dust; arsimony is observed in doling out a sty nook, a gloomy er, a little portion of earth, to those whom, when alive, kingdoms could not satisfy, and how many shapes and forms and arti?ces are devised to catch the casual notice of the passenger, and save from fetfulness for a few short years a name whice aspired to occupy ages of the worlds thought and admiration.

 I passed some time is er, which occupies an end of one of the tras or cross aisles of the abbey. The mos are generally simple, for the lives of literary men afford no striking themes for the sculptor. Shakespeare and Addison have statues erected to their memories, but the greater part have busts, medallions, and sometimes mere inscriptions.

 Notwithstanding the simplicity of these memorials, I have always observed that the visitors to the abbey remained lo about them. A kinder and fonder feeling takes place of that cold curiosity ue admiration with which they gaze on the splendid mos of the great and the heroic. They linger about these as about the tombs of friends and panions, for ihere is something of panionship betweehor and the reader. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is tinually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse betweehor and his fellowmen is ever new, active, and immediate. He has lived for them more than for himself; he has sacri?ced surrounding enjoyments, and shut himself up from the delights of social life, that he might the more intimately uh distant minds and distant ages. Well may the world cherish his renown, for it has been purchased not by deeds of violend blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure. Well may posterity be grateful to his memory, for he has left it an ia of empty names and sounding as, but whole treasures of wisdom, bright gems of thought, and golden veins of language.

 From Poets er I tinued my stroll towards that part of the abbey which tains the sepulchres of the kings. I wandered among what once were chapels, but which are now occupied by the tombs and mos of the great. At every turn I met with some illustrious name or the izance of some powerful house renowned in history. As the eye darts into these dusky chambers of death it catches glimpses of quaint ef?gies--some kneeling in niches, as if iion; others stretched upoombs, with hands piously pressed together; warriors in armor, as if reposing after battle; prelates, with crosiers and mitres; and nobles in robes and ets, lying as it were in state. In glang over this se, sely populous, yet where every form is so still and silent, it seems almost as if we were treading a mansion of that fabled city where every being had been suddenly transmuted into stone.

 I paused to plate a tomb on which lay the ef?gy of a knight in plete armor. A large buckler was on one arm; the hands were pressed together in supplication upon the breast; the face was almost covered by the morion; the legs were crossed, in token of the warriors having been engaged in the holy war. It was the tomb of a crusader, of one of those military enthusiasts who sely mingled religion and romance, and whose exploits form the eg liween fad ?, between the history and the fairytale. There is somethiremely picturesque iombs of these adventurers, decorated as they are with rude armorial bearings and Gothic sculpture. They port with the antiquated chapels in which they are generally found; and in sidering them the imagination is apt to kih the legendary associations, the romantic ?, the chivalrous pomp and pageantry which poetry has spread over the wars for the sepulchre of Christ. They are the relics of times utterly gone by, of beings passed from recolle, of s and manners with which ours have no af?nity. They are like objects from some strange and distant land of which we have ain knowledge, and about which all our ceptions are vague and visionary. There is somethiremely solemn and awful in those ef?gies on Gothibs, extended as if in the sleep of death or in the supplication of the dying hour. They have an effe?nitely more impressive on my feelings than the fanciful attitudes, the over wrought ceits, the allegorical groups which abound on modern mos. I have been struck, also, with the superiority of many of the old sepulchral inscriptions. There was a noble way in former times of saying things simply, a saying them proudly; and I do not knoitaph that breathes a loftier sciousness of family worth and honorable lihan one which af?rms of a noble house that "all the brothers were brave and all the sisters virtuous."

 In the opposite trao Poets er stands a mo which is among the most renowned achievements of modern art, but whie appears horrible rather than sublime. It is the tomb of Mrs. Nightingale, by Roubillac. The bottom of the mo is represented as throwing open its marble doors, and a sheeted skeleton is starting forth. The shroud is falling from his ?eshless frame as he launches his dart at his victim. She is sinking into her affrighted husbands arms, who strives with vain and frantic effort to avert the blow. The whole is executed with terrible truth and spirit; we almost fancy we hear the gibbering yell of triumph bursting from the distended jaws of the spectre.

 But why should we thus seek to clothe death with unnecessary terrors, and to spread horrors round the tomb of those we love?

 The grave should be surrounded by everything that might inspire tenderness and veion for the dead, or that might win the living to virtue. It is the plaot of disgust and dismay, but of sorrow aation.

 While wandering about these gloomy vaults and silent aisles, studying the records of the dead, the sound of busy existence from without occasionally reaches the ear--the rumbling of the passing equipage, the murmur of the multitude, or perhaps the light laugh of pleasure. The trast is striking with the deathlike repose around; and it has a strange effect upon the feelings thus to hear the surges of active life hurrying along aing against the very walls of the sepulchre.

 I tinued in this way to move from tomb to tomb and from cha<bdo></bdo>pel to chapel. The day was gradually wearing away; the distant tread of loiterers about the abbey grew less and less frequent; the sweet-tongued bell was summoning to evening prayers; and I saw at a distahe choristers in their white surplices crossing the aisle aering the choir. I stood before the entrao Henry the Sevenths chapel. A ?ight of steps leads up to it through a deep and gloomy but mag arch. Great gates of brass, richly and delicately wrought, turn heavily upon their hinges, as if proudly relut to admit the feet of ortals into this most geous of sepulchres.

 Oering the eye is astonished by the pomp of architecture and the elaborate beauty of sculptured detail. The very walls are wrought into universal or encrusted with tracery, and scooped into niches crowded with the statues of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the ing labor of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight ay, suspended aloft as if by magid the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb.

 Along the sides of the chapel are the lofty stalls of the Knights of the Bath, richly carved of oak, though with the grotesque decorations of Gothic architecture. On the pinnacles of the stalls are af?xed the helmets and crests of the knights, with their scarfs and swords, and above them are suspeheir banners, emblazoned with armorial bearings, and trasting the splendor of gold and purple and crimson with the cold gray fretwork of the roof. In the midst of this grand mausoleum stands the sepulchre of its founder--his ef?gy, with that of his queeended on a sumptuous tomb--and the whole surrounded by a superbly-wrought brazen railing.

 There is a sad dreariness in this magni?ce, this strange mixture of tombs and trophies, these emblems of living and aspiring ambition, close beside mementos which show the dust and oblivion in which all must sooner or later terminate. Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of lonelihan to tread the silent aed se of former throng and pageant.

 On looking round on the vat stalls of the knights and their esquires, and on the rows of dusty but geous bahat were once borne before them, my imagination jured up the se when this hall was bright with the valor ay of the land, glittering with the splendor of jewelled rank and military array, alive with the tread of ma and the hum of an admiring multitude. All had passed away; the silence of death had settled again upon the place, interrupted only by the casual chirping of birds, which had found their way into the chapel and built their s among its friezes and pendants--sure signs of solitariness aion.

 When I read the names inscribed on the banners, they were those of men scattered far and wide about the world--some tossing upon distant seas: some under arms in distant lands; some mingling in the busy intrigues of courts and ets,--all seeking to deserve one more distin in this mansion of shadowy honors--the melancholy reward of a mo.

 Two small aisles on each side of this chapel present a toug instance of the equality of the grave, which brings down the oppressor to a level with the oppressed and mihe dust of the bitterest eogether. In one is the sepulchre of the haughty Elizabeth; iher is that of her victim, the lovely and unfortunate Mary. Not an hour in the day but some ejaculation of pity is uttered over the fate of the latter, mingled with indignation at her oppressor. The walls of Elizabeths sepulchre tinually echo with the sighs of sympathy heaved at the grave of her rival.

 A peculiar melanchns over the aisle where Mary lies buried. The light struggles dimly through windows darkened by dust. The greater part of the place is in deep shadow, and the walls are stained and tinted by time aher. A marble ?gure of Mary is stretched upoomb, round which is an iron railing, much corroded, bearing her national emblem--the thistle.

 I was weary with wandering, and sat down to rest myself by the mo, revolving in my mind the chequered and disastrous story of poor Mary.

 The sound of casual footsteps had ceased from the abbey. I could only hear, now and then, the distant voice of the priest repeating the evening servid the faint responses of the choir; these paused for a time, and all was hushed. The stillness, the desertion, and obscurity that were gradally prevailing around gave a deeper and more solemn io the place;

 For in the silent grave no versation,

 No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers,

 No careful fathers sel--nothings heard,

 For nothing is, but all oblivion,

 Dust, and an endless darkness.

 Suddenly the notes of the deep-lab an burst upon the ear, falling with doubled and redoubled iy, and rolling, as it were, huge billows of sound. How well do their volume and grandeur accord with this mighty building! With omp do they swell through its vast vaults, and breathe their awful harmony through these caves <s></s>of death, and make the silent sepulchre vocal! And now they rise in triumphant acclamation, heaving higher and higher their accordant notes and piling sound on sound. And now they pause, and the soft voices of the choir break out into sweet gushes of melody; they soar aloft and warble along the roof, ao play about these lofty vaults like the pure airs of heaven. Again the pealing an heaves its thrilling thunders, pressing air into musid rolling it forth upon the soul. What long-drawn ces! What solemn sweeping cords! It grows more and more dense and powerful; it ?lls the vast pile and seems to jar the very walls--the ear is stuhe senses are overwhelmed. And now it is winding up in full jubilee--it is rising from the earth to heaven; the very soul seems rapt away and ?oated upwards on this swelling tide of harmony!

 I sat for some time lost in that kind of reverie which a strain of music is apt sometimes to inspire: the shadows of evening were gradually thiing rouhe mos began to cast deeper and deeper gloom; and the distant clock again gave token of the slowly waning day.

 I rose and prepared to leave the abbey. As I desded the ?ight of steps which lead into the body of the building, my eye was caught by the shrine of Edward the fessor, and I asded the small staircase that ducts to it, to take from thence a general survey of this wilderness of tombs. The shrine is elevated upon a kind of platform, and close around it are the sepulchres of various kings and queens. From this emihe eye looks dowween pillars and funeral trophies to the chapels and chambers below, crowded with tombs, where warriors, prelates, courtiers, and statesmen lie mouldering in their "beds of darkness." Close by me stood the great chair of ation, rudely carved of oak in the barbarous taste of a remote and Gothic age. The se seemed almost as if trived with theatrical arti?ce to produ effect upon the beholder. Here e of the beginning and the end of human pomp and power; here it was literally but a step from the throo the sepulchre. Would not ohink that these ingruous mementos had been gathered together as a lesson to living greatness?--to show it, even in the moment of its proudest exaltation, the and dishonor to which it must soon arrive--how soon that whicircles its brow must pass away, and it must lie down in the dust and disgraces of the tomb, arampled upon by the feet of the mea of the multitude. For, strao tell, even the grave is here no longer a sanctuary. There is a shog levity in some natures which leads them to sport with awful and hallowed things, and there are base minds which delight to revenge on the illustrious dead the abjeage and grovelling servility which they pay to the living. The of Edward the fessor has been broken open, and his remains despoiled of their funereal ors; the sceptre has been stolen from the hand of the imperious Elizabeth; and the ef?gy of Henry the Fifth lies headless. Not a royal mo but bears some proof how false and fugitive is the homage of mankind. Some are plundered, some mutilated, some covered with ribaldry and insult,--all more or less ed and dishonored.

 The last beams of day were now faintly streaming through the painted windows in the high vaults above me; the lower parts of the abbey were already ed in the obscurity of twilight. The chapels and aisles grew darker and darker. The ef?gies of the kings faded into shadows; the marble ?gures of the mos assumed strange shapes in the uain light; the evening breeze crept through the aisles like the cold breath of the grave; and even the distant footfall of a verger, traversing the Poets er, had something strange and dreary in its sound. I slowly retraced my ms walk, and as I passed out at the portal of the cloisters, the door, closing with a jarring noise behind me, ?lled the whole building with echoes.

 I endeavored to form some arra in my mind of the objects I had been plating, but found they were already falling into indistiness and fusion. Names, inscriptions, trophies, had all bee founded in my recolle, though I had scarcely taken my foot from off the threshold. What, thought I, is this vast assemblage of sepulchres but a treasury of humiliation--a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion? It is, ihe empire of death; his great shadowy palace where he sits in state mog at the relics of human glory and spreading dust and fetfulness on the mos of princes. How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a ime is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too mugrossed by the story of the present to think of the characters and aes that gave io the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily fotten. The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recolle, and will in turn be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow. "Our fathers," says Sir Thomas Browne, "?nd their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors." History fades into fable; fact bees clouded with doubt and troversy; the inscription moulders from the tablet; the statue falls from the pedestal. ns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand, and their epitaphs but characters written in the dust? What is the security of a tomb or the perpetuity of an embalmment? The remains of Alexahe Great have been scattered to the wind, and his empty sarcophagus is now the mere curiosity of a museum. "The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avariow eth; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."*

 What then is to ehis pile whiow towers above me from sharing the fate of mightier mausoleums? The time must e when its gilded vaults whiow spring so loftily, shall lie in rubbish beh the feet; when instead of the sound of melody and praise the wind shall whistle through the broken arches and the owl hoot from the shattered tower; when the garish sunbeam shall break into these gloomy mansions of death, and the ivy twine round the fallen n; and the fox-glove hang its blossoms about the nameless urn, as if in mockery of the dead. Thus man passes away; his name passebbr>?.</abbr>s from record and recolle; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very mo bees a ruin.

 * Sir T. Browne.

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