I should be at a loss to say why its English memories haunted my York
less than the Roman associations of the place. They form, however,
rather a clutter of incidents, whereas the few spreading facts of
Hadrian’s stay, the deaths of Severus and Constantius, and the election
of Constantine, his son, enlarge themselves to the atmospheric compass
of the place, but leave a roominess in which the fancy may more
commodiously orb about. I was on terms of more neighborly intimacy
with the poor Punic emperor than with any one else in York, doubtless
because, when he fell sick, he visited the temple of Bellona near
Bootham Bar, and paid his devotions unmolested, let us hope, by any
prevision of the misbehavior of his son Caracalla (whose baths I had
long ago visited at Rome) in killing his other son Geta. Everywhere I
could be an early Christian, in company with Constantine, in whom the
instinct of political Christianity must have begun to stir as soon as he
was chosen emperor. But I dare say I heard the muted tramp of the Sixth
Legion about the Yorkish streets above all other martial sounds because
I stayed as long as Doncaster Week would let me in the railway hotel,
which so many of their bones made room for when the foundations of it
were laid, with those of the adherent station. Their bones seem to
have been left there, after the disturbance, but their sepulchres were
respectfully transferred to the museum of the Philosophical Society, in
the grounds where the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey rise like fragments
of pensive music or romantic verse, inviting the moonlight and the
nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the noonday and the
babies in perambulators neglected by nurse-girls reading novels.
[Illustration: ST. MARY’S ABBEY]
The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of antiquities,
which is richer in Roman remains than any that one sees outside of
Italy. There are floors of mosaic, large and perfect, taken from the
villas which people are always digging up in the neighborhood of York,
and, from the graves uncovered in the railway excavations, coffins of
lead and stone for civilians, and of rude tiles for the soldiers of the
Sixth Legion; the slaves were cast into burial-pits of tens and twenties
and left to indiscriminate decay till they should be raised in the
universal incorruption. Probably the slaves were the earliest Christians
at York; certainly the monuments are pagan, as the inmates of the tombs
must have been. Some of the monuments bear inscriptions from loving
wives and husbands to the partners they have lost, and some of the stone
coffins are those of children. It is all infinitely touching, and after
two thousand years the heart aches for the fathers and mothers who laid
their little ones away in these hard cradles for their last sleep.
Faith changes, but constant death remains the same, and life is not very
different in any age, when it comes to the end. The Roman exiles who had
come so far to hold my British ancestors in subjection to their alien
rule seemed essentially not only of the same make as me, but the
same civilization. Their votive altars and inscriptions to other gods
expressed a human piety of like anxiety and helplessness with ours, and
called to a like irresponsive sky. A hundred witnesses of their mortal
state--jars and vases and simple household utensils--fill the shelves of
the museum; but the most awful, the most beautiful appeal of the past is
in that mass of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a special urn and
uncovered for your supreme emotion. It is equally conjectured to be the
hair of a Roman lady or of a British princess, but is of a young girl
certainly, dressed twenty centuries ago for the tomb in which it was
found, and still faintly lucent with the fashionable unguent of the day,
and kept in form by pins of jet. One thinks of the little, slender hands
that used to put them there, and of the eyes that confronted themselves
in the silver mirror under the warm shadow that the red-gold mass
cast upon the white forehead. This sanctuary of the past was the most
interesting place in that most interesting city of York, and the day of
our first visit a princess of New York sat reading a book in the midst
of it, waiting for the rain to be over, which was waiting for her to
come out and then begin again. We knew her from having seen her at the
station in relation to some trunks bearing her initials and those of
her native city; and she could be about the age of the York princess or
young Roman lady whose hair was kept in the urn hard by.
X
There is in York a little, old, old church, whose dear and reverend
name I have almost forgotten, if ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy
Trinity Goodramgate, which divides the heart of my adoration with the
Minster. We came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September
afternoons, after we had been visiting the Guildhall, Venetianly
overhanging the canal calm of the Ouse, and very worthy to be seen for
its York histories in stained glass. The custodian had surprised us and
the gentlemen of the committee by taking us into the room where they
were investigating the claims of the registered voters to the suffrage;
and so, much entertained and instructed, we issued forth, and, passing
by the church in which Guy Fawkes was baptized, only too ineffectually,
we came quite unexpectedly upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and
not another is indeed its name.
It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy space of its own,
with a wall hardly overlooked on one side by low stone cottages, the
immemorial homes of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the air
of not knowing that it is of Perpendicular and Decorated Gothic, with
a square, high-shouldered tower, as it bulks up to a very humble
height from the turf to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice
girl sketching its doorway, where a few especially favored weddings and
funerals may enter. It is open once a year for service, and when the
tourist will, or can, for the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful
stained glass of its eastward window. The oaken pews are square and
high-shouldered, like the low church tower; and, without, the soft
yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the window traceries. The church
did not look as if it felt itself a thousand years old, and perhaps it
is not; but I never was in a place where I seemed so like a ghost of
that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in the inner twilight and
the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was stirring the leaves of its
embowering trees and scattering them on the graves of my eleventh and
twelfth century contemporaries.