This is not the first poetical tribute which in our times has
been paid to this beautiful city. Mr. Southey, in the “Poet's
Pilgrimage,” speaks of it in lines which I cannot deny myself
the pleasure of connecting with my own.
‘Time hath not wronged her, nor hath ruin sought
Rudely her splendid structures to destroy,
Save in those recent days, with evil fraught,
When mutability, in drunken joy
Triumphant, and from all restraint released,
Let loose her fierce and many-headed beast.
But for the scars in that unhappy rage
Inflicted, firm she stands and undecayed;
Like our first Sires, a beautiful old age
Is hers in venerable years arrayed;
And yet, to her, benignant stars may bring,
What fate denies to man,—a second spring.
When I may read of tilts in days of old,
And tourneys graced by Chieftains of renown,
Fair dames, grave citizens, and warriors bold,
If fancy would portray some stately town,
Which for such pomp fit theatre should be,
Fair Bruges, I shall then remember thee.’
In this city are many vestiges of the splendour of the Burgundian
Dukedom, and the long black mantle universally worn
by the females is probably a remnant of the old Spanish connection,
which, if I do not much deceive myself, is traceable in
the grave deportment of its inhabitants. Bruges is comparatively
little disturbed by that curious contest, or rather conflict,
of Flemish with French propensities in matters of taste, so
conspicuous through other parts of Flanders. The hotel to
which we drove at Ghent furnished an odd instance. In the
passages were paintings and statues, after the antique, of Hebe
and Apollo; and in the garden, a little pond, about a yard and a
half in diameter, with a weeping willow bending over it, and
under the shade of that tree, in the centre of the pond, a wooden
painted statue of a Dutch or Flemish boor, looking ineffably
tender upon his mistress, and embracing her. A living duck,
tethered at the feet of the sculptured lovers, alternately tormented
a miserable eel and itself with endeavours to escape
from its bonds and prison. Had we chanced to espy the hostess
of the hotel in this quaint rural retreat, the exhibition would
have been complete. She was a true Flemish figure, in the
dress of the days of Holbein; her symbol of office, a weighty
bunch of keys, pendent from her portly waist. In Brussels, the
modern taste in costume, architecture, &c., has got the mastery;
in Ghent there is a struggle: but in Bruges old images are still
paramount, and an air of monastic life among the quiet goings-on
of a thinly-peopled city is inexpressibly soothing; a pensive
grace seems to be cast over all, even the very children.—
Extract from Journal.