Heart of Europe

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1915
 

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Page 11 - Reims, one of the wonders of the world, stands gaunt and shattered, wrecked by bombs, swept by fire, its windows that rivalled Chartres split into irremediable ruin, its statues devastated that once stood on a level with the sculptures of Greece ? The catastrophe itself is so unthinkable that the world does not now half realise it.
Page 114 - ... lecture by itself. Infinite in their variety, they are all under the same inspiration. Laon has its perfectly proportioned plan and its great scheme of seven clustering spires; Soissons has its wonderful south transept which Porter calls " one of the most ethereal of all twelfth century designs and the highest expression of that fairy-like, Saracenic phase of Gothic art that had first come into being at Noyon.
Page 315 - They appear and disappear on the historic horizon confusingly, the only unifying condition being a general and most sacred sense of mission, the mission being the demolition of the universe. The first head upon which history steadily focusses its light is that of the great Clovis. He was lord of the small Salian tribe in Batavia and sacked and plundered all around him to such an extent that the other Frankish tribes who lived along the Belgic rivers were smitten with admiration and flocked to the...
Page 202 - Gothic at its best as may be found anywhere in the world. It is really indescribable in its combination of majesty, brilliancy of design, and inconceivable intricacy of detail. The exuberance that...
Page 13 - Rhine; consider what it meant once, what it means even now, what for the future it is destined to mean as never before. For the old passes: the old that began with Machiavelli and is ending with von Bernhardi. It is not alone Prussia that will be purged by the fire of an inevitable conflict, nor Germany, nor all the Teuton lands; it is the whole world, that sold its birthright for a mess of pottage and now, in terror of the price at last to be paid, denounces the infamous contract and fights to the...
Page 4 - Louvain, and Liege; Aix-laChapelle, Coblentz, and Treves; Ypres and Lille, Tournai and Fontenay, Arras and Malplaquet; Laon, Nancy, Verdun, and Varennes; Amiens, Soissons, and Reims. Caesar, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders, and marshals unnumbered; kings, princebishops, monks, knights, and aureoled saints take form and shape again at the clang of the splendid names. And in all these places, and by all these men (and elsewhere, endlessly, and by hands unnumbered),...
Page 6 - Abbaye des Lys, dead witnesses of the faith that had built them, and the spared monuments as well. When the University of Louvain recently passed in the smoke and flame of a murdered city; when the church of St. Pierre and the cathedral of Malines and the shrine of Our Lady of Rheims were shattered by bombs and swept by devouring fire, there was something in it all other than the grim necessity of a savage war; there was the symbol of a new thing in the world, built on all Louvain, Malines and Rheims...

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