Читать книгу The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor онлайн

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Visit in London.—Exhibition of Relics.—The Lessons of Travel.—Historical Association.—London to Ostend.—The Cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle.—The Great Cathedral at Cologne.—Voyage up the Rhine.—Longfellow’s “Hyperion.”—Visit to Frankfort.—Kind Friends.—Reaches Heidelberg.—Climbing the Mountains.

London is a world in itself, as has often been written and, to such an impressible mind as that of Bayard, was a place, replete with pleasure and instruction. London instructs by two methods; one by agreeable, and the other by disagreeable examples. Bayard was equally taught by both. There was Westminster Abbey, with its numberless tombs of the talented and noble; and there was the Tower of London, with its dungeons and beheading blocks. There were the palatial residences of the West End, and there the hovels and holes of the Wych Street district. There were the great mercantile houses of Holborn and Regent Street, and there were the gambling dens of Drury Lane. There were the magnificent galleries of art, at the Museum, at the Palaces, at Westminster, and at Kensington; and there were the dirty, slimy exhibitions of marred humanity along the wharves of the Thames. There were the zoölogical wonders of the parks, and there were the dog-shows, and cock-pits of the St. Giles Rookery. There was the palace of the Queen, and there the Old Bailey. There was the office of the “Thunderer” (Daily Times), and there were the attics from whence flowed the vilest trash that man ever printed. There were Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, St. James Park, and the broad squares; and there were the filthy alleys and narrow lanes about London Bridge. There were the Rothschilds, and there the poor Micawbers and deserted Nicholas Nicklebys. The richest, the poorest, the best, the worst; the most cultivated, and the most ignorant; the most powerful monarch, and the most degraded fishmongers. Extremes! Extremes that meet in everything there. They all instruct by teaching the beholder what he ought to be, and what he ought not to be. One sees much in London that ought not to have been; and, strange to relate, many of the relics connected with such things, are exhibited with great pride. If there is any one thing above all others, for which the American should be thankful, it is for the fact that the dungeon, the rack, the wheel, the thumbscrew, the guillotine, the gibbet, the headsman’s block, the deadly hates of royalty, the cruelty of kings, and the jealousy of queens, have no place in the history of the Republic of the West. Yet there, somehow, the officials and guides who open to the public the records of the past and show visitors their institutions, give the most prominent places to deeds of horrid cruelty and shameless murders, as if they took pride in such fearful annals. It would seem as if, had our rulers butchered in cold blood their sons and daughters; had they cruelly starved their friends and relatives, we in America would be ashamed of it. It would be regarded as very natural here, if an ancestor was hung and quartered and his head carried about on a pole, to speak of it as seldom as possible. It would appear consistent if, had our national government oppressed the weak, degraded the poor, killed inoffensive captives, and, for selfish ambition, laid waste the cities and fields of an innocent people, we should attempt to bury the remembrance of those deeds so deep as to make a resurrection impossible. But there, in Europe, they appear to revel in the hideous doings of their ancestors, and will show you where human heads or bands were exhibited, and where noble men and women were persecuted to martyrdom, with the air of the circus manager who announces the clown. Who can hear the guide on London Bridge, “Here was posted the bleeding head of Sir William Wallace, the Scotch warrior and patriot, while the quarters of his body were at Stirling, Berwick, Perth, and Newcastle,” and not curse, with the deepest feeling, the people who murdered one of the greatest and best of men?