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abbeys Amiens amongst ancient Antwerp architect architecture Arras artistic beauty Beauvais Belgium Bourges Brabant Bruges Brussels Burgundy carved cathedral Catholic centre chapel Charlemagne Charles Chartres Christian churches civilisation Clovis coal and iron Cologne colour Count of Flanders Courtrai crown culture destroyed Duke eleventh century Emperor Empire Eyck fifteenth century Flanders and Brabant Flemish France French Germany Ghent glory gone Gothic Heart of Europe Hôtel Hubert Van Eyck hundred Île de France King land Laon Liége lines Louis Louvain Luxembourg Malines Margaret Mary of Burgundy masterpiece mediæval medieval Middle Ages monasteries Moselle Netherlands nineteenth century noble Noyon painting Paris peace perfect Philip Prince provinces Reims religion remains Renaissance restoration Revolution Rhine Rhineland Roman ruin sculpture spire spiritual splendid Strasbourg tapestries Teutonic things tion Tournai tower transepts Trèves ture turies UNIV VIMU wonderful Ypres
Popular passages
Page 314 - Christianity — and this is its highest merit — has, in some degree, softened, but it could not destroy, that brutal German joy of battle. When once the taming talisman, the Cross, breaks in two, the savagery of the old fighters, the senseless Berserker fury of which the northern poets sing and say so much, will gush up anew. That talisman is decayed, and the day will come when it will piteously collapse. Then the old stone gods will rise from the silent ruins, and rub the dust of a thousand years...
Page 9 - 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 8 - If 816 817 we should lose them now, as we almost lost Louvain, standing in the midst of the roaring flame and drifting smoke, while tall churches and rich universities and fair old houses crumbled and died around it, what should we not lose? And the churches, those matchless monuments, four, five, and six centuries old, where generations have brought all their best to glorify God, where glass and sculpture, tapestries and fretted woodwork, pictures, and gold and silver wrought cunningly into immortal...
Page 104 - ... 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 5 - Rheims are gone, with the greater part of their treasured art, while Laon, Soissons, and Namur have been grievously wrecked, Antwerp and Brussels are devastated, and innumerable smaller cities lie in the path of a furious army. Apparently, Amiens, Noyon, Bruges, and Ghent are now safe, but endless opportunities open for destruction and pillage, and we may well be prepared for irreparable loss before the invader is hurled back across his natural river frontier. Let us consider, not what already has...
Page 106 - Italian peninsula from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the sixteenth century AD28 They are, of course, existent at the present time.
Page 130 - ... and roofed with a mass of oak timbering like an ancient and enormous ship turned bottom up.
Page 1 - Caesar, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders, and marshals unnumbered; kings, prince-bishops, monks, knights, and aureoled saints take form and shape again at the clang of the splendid names.
Page 262 - Bronze is rejected, shattered, dethroned, but some of the great bells yet remain, hanging silent and patient while hell rages around them and iron asserts its universal dominion. Perhaps by and by they will give tongue again, proclaiming the end of the iron age, calling in once more a better and more righteous sovereignty. Some day the world will awaken to the fact that there are other great arts besides architecture, painting, and sculpture; already there is a suspicion abroad that music, poetry,...
Page 96 - Sacramentum est corporale vel materiale elementum foris sensibiliter propositum, ex similitudine repraesentans et ex institutione significans et ex sanctificatione continens aliquam invisibilem et spiritualem gratiam.