the old spirit of the place came over us. We sat on a bench in the market-place, a treeless square, hemmed in by quaint, gabled houses, late in the evening, to listen to the chimes from the belfry. The tower is less than four hundred feet high, and not so high by some seventy feet as the one on Notre Dame near by; but it is very picturesque, in spite of the fact that it springs out of a rummagy-looking edifice, one half of which is devoted to soldiers' barracks, and the other to markets. The chimes are called the finest in Europe. It is well to hear the finest at once, and so have done with the tedious things. The Belgians are as fond of chimes as the Dutch are of stagnant water. We heard them everywhere in Belgium; and in some towns they are incessant, jangling every seven and a half minutes. The chimes at Bruges ring every quarter hour for a minute, and at the full hour attempt a tune. The revolving machinery grinds out the tune, which is changed at least once a year; and on Sundays a musician, chosen by the town, plays the chimes. In so many bells (there are forty-eight), the least of which weighs twelve pounds, and the largest over eleven thousand, there must be soft notes and sonorous tones; so sweet jangled sounds were showered down: but we liked better than the confused chiming the solemn notes of the great bell striking the hour. There is something very poetical about this chime of bells high in the air, flinging down upon the hum and traffic of the city its oft-repeated benediction of peace; but anybody but a Lowlander would get very weary of it. These chimes, to be sure, are better than those in London, which became a nuisance; but there is in all of them a tinkling attempt at a tune, which always fails, that is very annoying.
Bruges has altogether an odd flavor. Piles of wooden sabots are for sale in front of the shops; and this ugly shoe, which is mysteriously kept on the foot, is worn by all the common sort. We see long, slender carts in the street, with one horse hitched far ahead with rope traces, and no thills or pole.
The women-nearly every one we saw-wear long cloaks of black cloth with a silk hood thrown back. Bruges is famous of old for its beautiful women, who are enticingly described as always walking the streets with covered faces, and peeping out from their mantles. They are not so handsome now they show their faces, I can testify. Indeed, if there is in Bruges another besides the beautiful girl who showed us the old council-chamber in the Palace of justice, she must have had her hood pulled over her face.
Next morning was market-day. The square was lively with carts, donkeys, and country people, and that and all the streets leading to it were filled with the women in black cloaks, who flitted about as numerous as the rooks at Oxford, and very much like them, moving in a winged way, their cloaks outspread as they walked, and distended with the market-basket underneath. Though the streets were full, the town did not seem any less deserted; and the early marketers had only come to life for a day, revisiting the places that once they thronged. In the shade of the tall houses in the narrow streets sat red-cheeked girls and women making lace, the bobbins jumping under their nimble fingers. At the church doors hideous beggars crouched and whined—specimens of the fifteen thousand paupers of Bruges. In the fishmarket we saw odd old women, with Rembrandt colors in faces and costume; and while we strayed about in the strange city, all the time from the lofty tower the chimes fell down. What history crowds upon us! Here in the old cathedral, with its monstrous tower of brick, a portion of it as old as the tenth century, Philip the Good established, in 1429, the Order of the Golden Fleece, the last chapter of which was held by Philip the Bad in 1559, in the rich old Cathedral of St. Bavon, at Ghent. Here, on the square, is the site of the house where the Emperor Maximilian was imprisoned by his rebellious Flemings; and next it, with a carved lion, that in which Charles II. of England lived after the martyrdom of that patient and virtuous ruler, whom the English Prayerbook calls that “blessed martyr, Charles the First.” In Notre Dame are the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary his daughter.
We begin here to enter the portals of Dutch painting. Here died Jan van Eyck, the father of oil painting; and here, in the hospital of St. John, are the most celebrated pictures of Hans Memling. The most exquisite in color and finish is the series painted on the casket made to contain the arm of St. Ursula, and representing the story of her martyrdom. You know she went on a pilgrimage to Rome, with her lover, Conan, and eleven thousand virgins; and, on their return to Cologne, they were all massacred by the Huns. One would scarcely believe the story, if he did not see all their bones at Cologne.
GHENT AND ANTWERP
What can one do in this Belgium but write down names, and let memory recall the past? We came to Ghent, still a hand some city, though one thinks of the days when it was the capital of Flanders, and its merchants were princes. On the shabby old belfry-tower is the gilt dragon which Philip van Artevelde captured, and brought in triumph from Bruges. It was originally fetched from a Greek church in Constantinople by some Bruges Crusader; and it is a link to recall to us how, at that time, the merchants of Venice and the far East traded up the Scheldt, and brought to its wharves the rich stuffs of India and Persia. The old bell Roland, that was used to call the burghers together on the approach of an enemy, hung in this tower. What fierce broils and bloody fights did these streets witness centuries ago! There in the Marche au Vendredi, a large square of old-fashioned houses, with a statue of Jacques van Artevelde, fifteen hundred corpses were strewn in a quarrel between the hostile guilds of fullers and brewers; and here, later, Alva set blazing the fires of the Inquisition. Near the square is the old cannon, Mad Margery, used in 1382 at the siege of Oudenarde—a hammered-iron hooped affair, eighteen feet long. But why mention this, or the magnificent town hall, or St. Bavon, rich in pictures and statuary; or try to put you back three hundred years to the wild days when the iconoclasts sacked this and every other church in the Low Countries?
Up to Antwerp toward evening. All the country flat as the flattest part of Jersey, rich in grass and grain, cut up by canals, picturesque with windmills and red-tiled roofs, framed with trees in rows. It has been all day hot and dusty. The country everywhere seems to need rain; and dark clouds are gathering in the south for a storm, as we drive up the broad Place de Meir to our hotel, and take rooms that look out to the lace-like spire of the cathedral, which is sharply defined against the red western sky.
Antwerp takes hold of you, both by its present and its past, very strongly. It is still the home of wealth. It has stately buildings, splendid galleries of pictures, and a spire of stone which charms more than a picture, and fascinates the eye as music does the ear. It still keeps its strong fortifications drawn around it, to which the broad and deep Scheldt is like a string to a bow, mindful of the unstable state of Europe. While Berlin is only a vast camp of soldiers, every less city must daily beat its drums, and call its muster-roll. From the tower here one looks upon the cockpit of Europe. And yet Antwerp ought to have rest: she has had tumult enough in her time. Prosperity seems returning to her; but her old, comparative splendor can never come back. In the sixteenth century there was no richer city in Europe.
We walked one evening past the cathedral spire, which begins in the richest and most solid Gothic work, and grows up into the sky into an exquisite lightness and grace, down a broad street to the Scheldt. What traffic have not these high old houses looked on, when two thousand and five hundred vessels lay in the river at one time, and the commerce of Europe found here its best mart. Along the stream now is a not very clean promenade for the populace; and it is lined with beer-houses, shabby theaters, and places of the most childish amusements. There is an odd liking for the simple among these people. In front of the booths, drums were beaten and instruments played in bewildering discord. Actors in paint and tights stood without to attract the crowd within. On one low balcony, a copper-colored man, with a huge feather cap and the traditional dress of the American savage, was beating two drums; a burnt-cork black man stood beside him; while on the steps was a woman, in hat and shawl, making an earnest speech to the crowd. In another place, where a crazy band made furious music, was an enormous “go-round” of wooden ponies, like those in the Paris gardens, only here, instead of children, grown men and women rode the hobby-horses, and seemed delighted with the sport. In the general Babel, everybody
