The Land of Haunted Castles

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A Love Eternal None shall part us From each other, One in life and love are we. ?W. S. Gilbert. CHAPTER V Time's Footprints SO a thousand years have passed and feudalism is sounding its lordly trumpets before the portcullis of Luxemburg. The illustrious and storied country has advanced that incalculable...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A Love Eternal None shall part us From each other, One in life and love are we. ?W. S. Gilbert. CHAPTER V Time's Footprints SO a thousand years have passed and feudalism is sounding its lordly trumpets before the portcullis of Luxemburg. The illustrious and storied country has advanced that incalculable step which lies between an existence purely geographical and true nationality. From Julius Caesar to Siegfroid and the fairy Melusine, Time has trodden a queer pathway. The sands from his hour-glass have spilled upon a road paved dim centuries ago by the flamens of the Druids and the sacrificial altar- stones of the cult of Wotan. The shadows of successive springs have fallen across the sculptured shrines of Roman goddesses, the stone coffins of the Franks, the flagged courtyards of robbers' roosts, the modest chancels of Christian chapels, the ash-strewn trails of destructive invaders, the happy streets of villages built by empire, the wreckage of desolation. Along that road to the dawn of the world are countless landmarks. About the landmarks cling scores of romances that have found no favor with the makers of books. One knows something of the habits of the early Celts, of whom no contemporaneous word has been written, through the implements and monuments that they left behind in dying. The grim mysteries of the Druids are made real through the crop of strange rocks, planted in fire and irrigated with blood, still hidden in all their terrible secretiveness in shadowed groves and silent marshes. Had Caesar never written his one-sided commentaries, the magnificence of the empire that he helped so much to build would be realized from the burial hillocks along the magnificent highways constructed for his armies. Treat legend kindly, observes Guizot ..