THE CHURCH UNDER CONSTANTINE
Constantine’s Edict—St. Sylvester, the Friend of Constantine—Refuge
at Soracte—The Emperor’s Vision—“In Hoc Vinces”—Constantine’s
Baptism—The Church Has Peace—Helena’s Basilica—The Blessing
of the Golden Rose—Origin of St. Peter’s—The Obelisk from
Heliopolis—Testimony of the Dust of the Martyrs—The Place of
the Shock of Horses—The Beauty of St. Peter’s—Pilgrims from
Britain—Charlemagne, the Blessed.
“And the Church had peace!” Those few words are all that are used to
describe the overwhelming relief of the world when Constantine caused
his great edict to be proclaimed throughout the Empire. “Let none
henceforth dare to molest the Christians in the exercise of their
religion or in the building of Temples to God.”
The frightful persecution under Diocletian, more cruel and bloody
than all that had preceded it, had been continued by his successor
Galerius,[22] and was still active, still a living menace to the
faithful; and, as they had done so often during the past three hundred
years, they had to fly to their underground refuges or out into
the desert to call upon the rocks and mountains to cover them. St.
Melchiades, whom St. Augustine calls “the true son of the Peace of
our Lord Jesus Christ,” became Pope in 311 and suffered such great
tribulations for the faith in the beginning of his pontificate that
the Church reckons him among the martyrs, although he lived to see
her triumph, dying only in 313. To him succeeded Sylvester, the great
ruler, the friend of Constantine, whose name is so intimately connected
with the foundation of the two chief basilicas of Christendom, that of
St. John Lateran and that of St. Peter’s.
Before being called to the Papacy, St. Sylvester had been a zealous
and holy priest for many years, but during a part of that time he
had been obliged to live in hiding on Mount Soracte, the strange rock
which raises itself from the Campagna, some twenty-five miles to the
northeast of Rome, to culminate in a precipitous cliff two thousand
two hundred and seventy feet high—as if arrested by the sight of the
distant city. I think it was Byron who compared it to a wave about
to break, and no other simile describes it half so well. I spent a
heavenly day there in my youth and came away regretfully, not only
because of the superb view of the Apennine panorama at which I had
been gazing, but because of the ideal aloofness and sweetness of the
atmosphere round the ruined convent on the summit, where, though I
was then in the first flush of youth, I would gladly have remained for
years. Soracte, under its present name, was well known to the Romans;
Horace had sung of the mantle of the snow that lay on its rough sides
in the winter; Virgil spoke of it reverently as one of the homes of
Apollo, who had a temple there; so its name is not a contraction of
St. Oreste, as some used to think, though a Church and monastery were
dedicated to that saint on Soracte very early in our era. The monk who
acted as our guide could not tell me much about him, but spoke of St.
Sylvester’s sojourn on the mountain as if he had left it but the day
before. The lonely peak was not always lonely, the geologists say. Long
ages previous to the foundation of Rome the Apennines flung out their
chain thus far; then came great heavings in earth’s fiery heart; she
opened and the hills sank back whence they had come, and “the mountains
were made plain”; they disappeared, leaving this solitary vanguard rock
to mark their vanished limit and their actual sepulchre.
How gladly must Sylvester have sped back to Rome over the long Milvian
Way, as soon as he could resume his sacred duties in the city! He must
have been there when Constantine, with his great host, paused at the
“Saxa rubra” (the red rocks over which I have often wandered, seeking
for wild flowers), near the Milvian Bridge, depressed and anxious, and
very fearful that the army he led was not strong enough to overcome the
usurper, Maxentius, who had fortified himself behind its walls. In this
month of May, 1913, Catholics from all over the world are thronging
to Rome to take part in the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of that day.
For Constantine, hesitating to attack, was standing without his camp,
gazing at the western sky, towards which the sun was sinking, as the
chroniclers tell us, thinking of what lay before him, thinking, too,
of what lay behind—of the long years during which he had half believed
in Christianity without being made a Christian; thinking of what would
happen to his soul should he, still unbaptised, be slain in the now
inevitable conflict; thinking, we may be sure, of his good mother,
Helena, over there in Constantinople, storming Heaven with prayers
for his safety. It was all enough to make even an Emperor thoughtful,
and Constantine was a man who took both this life and the next very
seriously.
Then, as officers and men watched their leader’s face grow darker and
more gloomy, and the reflection of his melancholy began to gain them
all, “airy and excellent” the vision came. Resting on the setting
sun as on a pedestal, and paling that glory by its own more dazzling
splendour, a gigantic cross flamed out across the cloudless sky, and as
all gazed, terror-stricken and breathless, these words wrote themselves
in fire against the blue: “In hoc vinces”[23]—“In this thou shalt
conquer!” The portent hung for many minutes, some say for an hour, and
then slowly withdrew into the empyrean, and the empty sky and the empty
Campagna, the gleaming host and the proud rebel city, alone remained.
And Constantine conquered. Maxentius, doomed, came out to meet him,
and there was great slaughter, in which the upstart thief of the Purple
died no honourable death, but was pushed off the bridge in the furious
mêlée and choked in Tiber’s mud. And Constantine caused the Eagles
to be replaced by the Cross on his standards, and entered in triumph
to throw himself at the feet of Sylvester and, holding up his poor
leprous[24] hands in piteous entreaty, to beg for health and baptism.
Gladly and with great thanksgiving the Pope baptised him, and the water
that washed away his sins cleansed his flesh, so that when he came up
out of the sacred fountain there was no mark of leprosy on his body or
of guilt upon his soul—“and the Church had peace.”
Constantine’s first thought was now to honour God by some splendid
testimony of his gratitude, and, under the direction of Sylvester, he
built the Basilica of the Holy Saviour, called also St. John’s before
the Latin Gate. It was here that the evangelist suffered martyrdom
in intention, was cruelly scourged, and plunged in boiling oil. God
saved his life in order that he might write his sublime last book in
the solitude of the Isle of Patmos, whither the persecutors exiled him
after their attempts to slay him had failed; and to him, the beloved
Virgin disciple, Constantine dedicated this, his first thank-offering,
called ever since “the Mother of all the Churches in the World.”
After that came Constantine’s own mother, Saint Helena, to Rome,
having, to her eternal glory, discovered the Saviour’s Cross in
Jerusalem and desiring to bring a part of that sacred Tree to the
centre of Christendom.
Standing on the green terrace at the southern end of Constantine’s
Basilica, she saw a great empty space, beyond which, at the other end
of the long decline that sinks away from it towards the southeast,
there stood a half-ruined villa; there she resolved to raise the
trophy of her own gratitude and to provide a fitting shrine for the
inestimable treasure she had brought. But the Cross was still to rest
on the soil that Jesus had trod. She caused a shipload of earth to be
brought from Jerusalem, and on this the foundations of the Basilica
of the Holy Cross were laid, contiguous to a palace which was her
chosen dwelling during her sojourn in Rome. The Basilica, so frequently
rebuilt and restored that probably no part of the exterior would now
be recognised by the pious Empress, is dark and bare, but symmetrical
in outline and possessing a severe dignity of its own. It presents a
marked contrast to the florid yet noble southern portico of St. John
Lateran, and the long green avenue, shaded by double rows of mulberry
trees, which used to connect the two, seemed to lead the spirit by
fitting degrees from the splendid stability of Catholic worship to-day
to the sterner conditions of that long-vanished past.
Until the Papacy transferred its seat to Avignon, the green plain
between Helena’s Basilica and the Lateran was, once a year, the
scene of a beautiful and mystical ceremony. On the Fourth Sunday in
Lent, when the Church, to encourage her children in their forty days’
career of penance, replaces her sombre vestments by those of crimson
and gold reserved for great feasts, when the organ, dumb since Ash
Wednesday, once more fills the cathedrals with joyous music, when the
Mass begins with the command to rejoice—then the Pope, accompanied
by the Cardinals, went to the “Mother of all the Churches,” St. John
Lateran, and there, with a prayer of wonderful beauty, blessed and
sanctified the “Golden Rose.” The rose being the emblem of Divine
love, shedding around the sweet fragrance of charity, often found a
place in the ceremonial of the Church. For this particular occasion a
cunning jeweller fashioned a flower in pure gold, blossom and leaf and
stem, and the Pontiff prayed to the Creator of all beautiful things,
who was Himself the true Joy and Hope of His children, to bless the
flower carried as a sign of spiritual joy, in order that the faithful,
contemplating it, might raise their hearts to the heavenly Jerusalem,
and persevere in the sweet odour of good works until they should be
eternally united to Him who is the flower come forth from the branch
of Jesse, who called Himself the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the
Valley; and that, in the company of all the blessed, they might glorify
forever the Divine Flower who shall reign in Heaven eternally.
When the prayers were over, the Pope came forth from the Lateran,
wearing the mitre and holding the Golden Rose in his hand; mounting his
white palfrey, and accompanied by the whole Pontifical Court, he rode
down the green way to the Basilica of the Holy Cross. There he preached
a sermon on the virtues symbolised by the rose (there is still one of
these sermons extant, delivered by Innocent III) and then celebrated
Holy Mass. When that was over, he returned on horseback, still holding
the Golden Rose and followed by the whole gorgeous cavalcade to St.
John Lateran, where, if some royal prince happened to be present,
his was the honour of assisting the Holy Father to dismount, and he
received, in reward for his filial piety, the Golden Rose from the
Pope’s own hands.
In our days the ceremony of blessing the Rose takes place in a hall of
the Vatican, and the Holy Father sends it as a gift usually to some
Catholic princess—I remember that a few years ago he sent one to our
little English Queen of Spain. I heard of another, and a very touching,
present sent by Leo XIII to a royal lady who was awaiting the birth of
her child—the baby’s entire layette, marvels of beauty worked by the
nuns, and all blessed by the Holy Father for the small Christian who
was to wear the garments!
After founding the Church of St. John Lateran, the zeal of Constantine
led him to build another and greater one over the tomb of St. Peter.
For this the tomb itself served as a nucleus, and Constantine would
have no hands but his own dig the beginning of the foundations. “Laying
aside the chlamys” (the mantle on which were embroidered the insignia
of his rank) “he opened the earth for the construction of the Basilica.
Then he carried away on his own shoulders twelve basketfuls of earth,
in honour of the twelve Apostles.” The work thus inaugurated was
continued under his direction. The body of the blessed Apostle was at
this time brought back from the Catacombs to its original resting-place
with great glory, and encased in a magnificent silver coffin which in
its turn was placed inside a sarcophagus of gilt bronze. Constantine
forbade any but the priests to touch the sarcophagus, under pain of
severe punishment. At one point on the way, the bearers seemed to be
wavering a little, and a common workman, forgetting the Emperor’s
orders, stretched out his hand to steady it. There was no need for
Constantine to punish him, for the poor fellow’s hand shrivelled up at
the contact, only to be restored after earnest prayers for forgiveness
of this irreverence.
The incident may be legendary, but it reminds me of a later and more
authentic one connected with the obelisk which stands in the centre
of the Piazza of St. Peter’s. This huge monolith of red granite was
brought by Caligula from Heliopolis—the scene of General Kléber’s
victory and violent death on the 14th of June, 1800, while Marengo
was being fought and won. Its arrival caused great excitement in
the imperial city and crowds went out to see it as it lay at Ostia
in a ship built on purpose to carry it and, as Pliny informs us,
“almost as long as the left side of the port of Ostia.” Unlike most
of the Egyptian obelisks, it bears no inscriptions of any kind on
its polished sides. It first stood in the Circus of Nero, on ground
now covered by the Sacristy of St. Peter’s, and it was only under
Sixtus V, in 1586, that it was placed in its present position. Its
enormous size and weight (about three hundred and twenty tons) made
the moving and erection a labour of the greatest difficulty. The work
was superintended by Fontana, the eminent architect, who employed
eight hundred men and one hundred and fifty horses to drag it the
short distance to the centre of the Piazza. Then came the raising
and placing on the pedestal prepared for it, a task so delicate and
anxious that Sixtus forbade any one, under pain of death, to utter
a single word during the process. Slowly and unwillingly the huge
thing submitted to be raised from the ground, but, before it had
reached the perpendicular, that happened which the architect had not
foreseen—the enormous cables began to stretch. The strain dragged on
them so fearfully that in a few minutes they must have parted—and
the obelisk would have thundered to the ground; but a brave sailor
man, casting self-preservation to the winds, shouted, “Water on the
ropes.” Instantly he was obeyed; a thousand hands sent the buckets
flying along, the cables were drenched, and they held till the giant
rose obediently in air and settled squarely on its base. The grateful
Pope sent for the brave sailor and asked his name and birthplace.
“Bresca of Bordighera,” was the answer. What he gave to Bresca, the
chronicler has left to our imagination—probably enough to keep him in
fat comfort to the end of his days; but to Bordighera, that garden of
the Mediterranean shore, he gave the privilege of furnishing forever
the palms used in the Church on Palm Sunday; and down to 1870 there
came, every year, a ship to the mouth of the Tiber, full to the gunwale
with the Bordighera palm branches, which the nuns of Sant’ Antonio wove
and plaited into a thousand fanciful shapes, for use in the Palm Sunday
procession at St. Peter’s.
There is a touching story connected with the Piazza of St. Peter’s.
Twenty years or so before Sixtus V became Pope, the sainted Pius V was
reigning Pontiff (1566-1572). He had a great devotion to the blessed
martyrs—I remember possessing a little terra-cotta lamp ornamented with
Christian emblems, found in the Catacombs, which he had taken in his
hands and blessed for some pious soul. He often had to traverse the
great Piazza in going and coming from the Vatican, and he never did so
without thinking of all the brave Christian blood that had been shed
there in the early times. One day he was walking across the Piazza
deep in conversation with the Ambassador of the King of Poland, when
suddenly he paused, remembering the soil on which they stood. The place
was unpaved then, and the Pope, stooping down, took up a handful of
earth which he gave to the Ambassador, saying: “Keep this dust, for it
is composed of the ashes of the saints and steeped in the blood of the
martyrs.”
The Ambassador, as we gather, received the gift more with respect
for the hand that offered it than for its own sake. He spread out his
handkerchief, the Pope shed on it the handful of dust, and the courtly
Pole rolled it up and put it in his pocket.
When he returned to his palace, he drew the packet out, doubtless
wondering what he should do with the rather inconvenient contents. To
his awe, the cambric was wet with blood. He spread it out—the earth
had vanished and not a grain remained, but the handkerchief was steeped
in the brave blood that had been shed for Christ under Nero and that,
as one writer says, “had sprung forth again to attest, in the face of
heresy and schism, that the faith of the Church under Pius was the same
as the faith of the Church under Peter.”
Talking of Piazzas—the one which immediately conducted to that of St.
Peter’s has always been called “Piazza Scossa Cavalli,” the place of
the “shock of horses,” and this is the story of how it obtained the
name. Constantine’s mother, Helena, was, like her son, somewhat tardy
in openly professing Christianity, but her whole life after her baptism
was devoted to the service of God, particularly in the direction of
preserving and beautifying the holy places sanctified by the life
and sufferings of the Redeemer. To her we owe the finding of the True
Cross, the Crown of Thorns, and other instruments of the Passion; it
was she who built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the one on Mount
Calvary, spots which the pagans had marked for future identification
and veneration by setting up idols to keep the Christians from
praying there! Among other things she found on Mount Moriah the stone,
scrupulously preserved by the ancestor-loving Jews, on which Abraham
was preparing to sacrifice Isaac—the type of Christ—when the Angel
staid his arm and told him that the Lord would prove his faith no
further. This stone Helena conveyed to Rome, intending to place it in
St. Peter’s; but when the horses dragging the wagon which contained
it reached this spot, still quite distant from the Basilica, they
“jibbed,” as we should say, and no power on earth could induce them to
go a step further.
The Empress, her counsellors, and all the people took this as a sign
that Heaven destined the consecrated stone to remain in that place, and
a church, “San Giacomo a Scossa Cavalli,” was built and still stands
there to shelter Abraham’s Altar.
Constantine’s Basilica rose in strength and beauty, and was consecrated
in 326, thirteen years after that 13th of June, 313, when he had seen
the vision. Although only half the size of the present Church, it was,
until this was built, one of the three largest in Europe, the other
two being those of Milan and Seville; strangely enough, the three
were all of equal dimensions—three hundred and ninety-five feet long
by two hundred and twelve in width. Eighty-six marble pillars divided
the nave of St. Peter’s from the aisles and supported the roof; and,
like all the basilicas, it had a rich portico running all along its
front, also decorated with columns. The interior was gorgeous with
gold and Byzantine mosaic and precious marbles, and the Church itself
was the centre of a great mass of other sumptuous buildings, chapels,
and offices and monasteries, for the housing of the great body of
ecclesiastics charged with the service of the Church and the keeping of
the archives. The Basilica of Constantine was worthy of its founder,
and many another royal and imperial head was bent there in worship
during the centuries that followed; yet what storms and vicissitudes
assailed it before it sank away to rise again, like the phœnix of old,
in the glorious pile so dear to our hearts to-day! Constantine would
not have believed—what it is hard for us to accept even on the word
of those who saw it—that a time would come when Rome’s rightful rulers
would be constrained to withdraw not only from her, but from Italy, to
govern the Church from Avignon; when the Mistress of the World would
barely count thirty thousand souls within her walls, and the shepherds
of the Campagna should pasture their sheep on the rank grass that
covered the steps of St. Peter’s and all the ground around!
Were the spirits of the redeemed permitted to contemplate the crimes
and sorrows of earth, how some of them would have wept over the
apparent decay of this most sacred of fanes, the goal so eagerly sought
by all pilgrims, gentle or simple, during the Ages of Faith!
Hither came Charlemagne, and many other great ones, both before and
after him, some worthy of Heaven’s favour, some in the rebellious
attempt to enslave the Church and make her work for them instead of for
Christ. But most entered St. Peter’s with humble and sincere hearts and
it is noticeable that, of the famous royal pilgrims, the larger part
came from Britain. One of the first was Cadwalla, King of the Saxons,
an ardent convert who travelled to Rome to be baptised at St. Peter’s
tomb, and was rewarded for his faith by dying immediately afterwards,
“spotless among the sheep of Christ.” Then we are told of the holy
Cenred, who had renounced the throne of Mercia to become a monk in Rome
and who, as a sign of his sincerity, cut off his flowing locks and laid
them at the shrine of the Apostle; another Briton, good King Ina of
Wessex, comes to pray, and to found a Church in honour of the Mother
of God, so that his subjects who come on pilgrimage may have their
own sanctuary to pray in and their own ground to receive their bodies
should they die in Rome; Offa, the Saxon, comes to ask St. Peter to
consider him as his vassal and Offa’s realm as a loyal tributary of his
own; and, almost greatest of all, in the year 854, our Holy Father, St.
Leo IV, being the reigning Pope, there walks one day into Constantine’s
Basilica a big fair-haired Englishman called Ethelwulf, leading a
little boy, six years old, bright of eye and sturdy of limb, by the
hand.
Behind them, in awed silence, comes a group of the white and ruddy
warriors of the North, gazing in wonder at the splendid Church,
full of treasures from East and West, such as they have never beheld
before. They voice their admiration in gruff whispers in a strange
tongue, unintelligible to the scattered worshippers around them, who,
doubtless, watch them with some apprehension, asking themselves whether
their coming be the herald of another Gothic invasion of Rome. But
the leader of the strangers goes up to the High Altar and kneels for
a space, the child kneeling too, but clinging tightly to his father’s
hand. Then the father stands up, and, addressing one of the attendant
priests in clear Latin, asks to be taken to the Pope.
It is Ethelwulf, King of the Anglo-Saxons; he has come to ask the Holy
Father to crown him; and the little boy, on whom the Pope smiles, and
who receives the pontifical blessing so blithely, grows up to be Alfred
the Great.
But among all the pilgrims of those ages the supreme figure is that of
Charlemagne, the giant in heart and mind and body who declared that he
only ruled to extend the reign of Christ on earth, and in his will left
to his successors, as the most precious part of their heritage, the
privilege of defending and sustaining the Church. He had passed away
forty years before Ethelwulf brought his little son to Rome, but his
greatness lived after him and none can doubt that Alfred pondered his
wise laws and strove to imitate the wonderful combination of strength
and justice and mercy of which he set the example. I saw his crown, in
the Ambras collection at Vienna, a huge straight band of gold, large
enough to slip over an ordinary man’s head and rest on his shoulders,
heavy with barbaric jewels, big as plover’s eggs, set in its circle.
This was, I think, the one he brought to Rome, when having, as he put
it, “with the help of God conquered the world,” he came to ask St. Leo
III to crown him and confirm his dominions. The portraits of him show
us a man indeed eight feet tall, with a long face, light brown beard,
and big anxious eyes—eyes that give one a glimpse of the great mind
behind, ever asking itself if there were any of all the things that
Heaven had asked of him left undone. One fault of his early life has
been so often cast up at his memory that it is but right to mention
it. When he was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, his mother, Bertrade, a
Greek, persuaded him, apparently on the grounds of some irregularity in
the marriage, to repudiate his queen, Himiltrude, and espouse another,
of her choosing, called Hermengarde. The reigning Pope, Stephen IV, on
learning of this action, reprimanded Charlemagne sharply and commanded
him to send away Hermengarde and recall Himiltrude, which command the
monarch obeyed, the second wife having held her place barely a year.
After Himiltrude’s death he made Liutgarde his queen; she also died,
and Charlemagne married again, more than once, but never gave the state
and title of queen to any woman after Liutgarde’s death. He has been
accused of having more than one wife at a time, but the most profound
and impartial students of history declare that the case of Himiltrude
and Hermengarde does not constitute bigamy and that there is no shadow
of support for the calumny in the contemporary chronicles.
Charlemagne’s private life has always been described as remarkably
pure; his enactments against immorality are terribly stringent, placing
illicit connections between unmarried persons on the same footing
as the breaking of the marriage vow; and more than once he published
these enactments, intended to restrain the license of the nobles, in
person, in full council of bishops and the nobles themselves, who, had
his own morals been assailable, would not have hesitated to tell him,
in their very outspoken way, to mend his practice before preaching to
others. There is no record of even a murmur of the kind. Also during
the time when, according to his detractors now, he was living in
sin, he was the close friend and pupil of two holy Popes—St. Adrian
I and St. Leo III, consulting them at every step and following their
advice with devout punctiliousness; we know that the Roman Pontiffs
never stood on ceremony when it was necessary to remonstrate with
Sovereigns as to their morals; yet neither of these saints, supreme
in Christendom, ever addressed a word of reproach to Charlemagne. On
the contrary, they showed, in their relations with him, the greatest
affection and respect. The question of his canonisation, in spite of
his heroic virtues and the miracles worked at his intercession, the
Church left where it was when Frederick Barbarossa, in the second half
of the Twelfth Century, succeeded in having him canonised by one of
the anti-Popes, Paschal III, an invalid proceeding, of course. But the
Church calls him “The Blessed Charlemagne” and permitted his feast
to be kept in numberless Churches of France and Germany; until our
own days several French colleges celebrated it by a banquet at which
the professors mingled on an equal footing with the most promising
of their students. He founded the two great universities of Paris and
Pavia, was deeply versed in theology and in such classical literature
as was available in the Ninth Century; and is perhaps best known to us
moderns by his hymn to the Holy Ghost, which the Church uses not only
at Pentecost, but on almost every day of the year, the immortal “Veni
Sancte Spiritus” so dear to us all.
It would be too long a task to enumerate his labours and conquests
for the faith; these are set forth in detail in the old Breviaries of
France; it took him thirty-four years to subdue the idolatrous Saxons,
alone, and the only penalty he imposed for the half of a lifetime spent
in arduous struggles was that they should listen to instruction and
embrace Christianity. Always hard on himself, fasting often for a week
at a time, wearing, except on great occasions, rough, simple garments
which, we are told, made him appear like one of the humblest of his
subjects, his charity was all-embracing and reached to the confines of
the known world. His honest humility made it dangerous to attempt to
flatter him about his achievements. If any one spoke of his victories,
he would point to the lance with which Longinus pierced the Saviour’s
side and which he always carried with him, and say, “Give God the
glory—_that_ is what overcame!”
Oh, that we might sometimes call up some of the great visions of
the past! Surely there was never one more significant and impressive
than on the day when Charlemagne, surrounded by his Paladins, knelt
on the sacred stone (still marked in the portico of St. Peter’s) and
St. Leo took the heavy crown in his aged hands and placed it on that
magnificent head. Charlemagne must have been one of those of whom the
Prophet spoke, when he said that the kings of the earth should bring
their honour and glory into Heaven. Would that he could return to us
who so need to see, and so despair of seeing, a born ruler, reigning
for God. Like our own Arthur, beloved of grateful and worshipping
humanity, the hope of his return never quite died out. In the places
where he passed, flashing by at the head of his chosen Paladins, is it
only fancy that still makes us hear the thunder of the hoof-beats, the
echo of the voice “sweet in music, strong in speech,” whose commands
the world obeyed? the echo of the call of Roland’s horn—when he blew
that last blast and Charlemagne, hundreds of miles away, leapt forth
with his peers to the rescue? They came too late. The last of the
Paladins fell fighting at Roncesvalles, far from where Charlemagne
lies with his fathers among the Savoyan hills, by the dreamy Lake of
Bourget.
Never had monarch a fairer resting-place. In a long past summer I rowed
across the lake to the lovely and splendid sanctuary, in the cool
of the evening, when twilight was descending, mild as sleep, on the
mountains; and earth and lake and sky were all one soft, mysterious
blue. There were comrades with me, young and gay as I, but when we
stood beside Charlemagne’s tomb in the dim church, a great silence fell
upon us. We felt, though we could not see, the great angels standing
round that royal grave—guarding it till the day when he who lies there
shall come forth, and all the generations that went before and have
come after him shall hear from God the praise he would not take from
men—“Well done, thou good and faithful servant!”