I yawned a little; nothing is so pleasant, as I have known later, as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.
When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only--What a crib from Rochefoucauld!
Brussels has stones that are sermons, or rather that are quaint, touching, illuminated legends of the middle ages, which those who run may read.
Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.
The city has its ways and wiles of Paris. It decks itself with white and gold. It has music under its trees and soldiers in its streets, and troops marching and counter-marching along its sunny avenues. It has blue and pink, and yellow and green, on its awnings and on its house-fronts. It has a merry open-air life on its pavements at little marble tables before little gay-coloured cafés. It has gilded balconies and tossing flags and comic operas, and leisurely pleasure-seekers, and tries always to believe and make the world believe that it is Paris in very truth.
But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse and the foreigners.
There is a Brussels that is better than this--a Brussels that belongs to the old burgher-life, to the artists and the craftsmen, to the master masons of Moyen-age, to the same spirit and soul that once filled the free men of Ghent and the citizens of Bruges and the besieged of Leyden, and the blood of Egmont and of Horne.
Down there by the water-side, where the old quaint walls lean over the yellow sluggish stream, and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges swing against the dusky piles of the crumbling bridges:
In the grey square desolate courts of the old palaces, where in cobwebbed galleries and silent chambers the Flemish tapestries drop to pieces:
In the great populous square, where, above the clamorous and rushing crowds, the majestic front of the Maison du Roi frowns against the sun, and the spires and pinnacles of the Burgomaster's gathering-halls tower into the sky in all the fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy:
Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the stillness of the cathedral, across whose sunny aisles some little child goes slowly all alone, laden with lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their white glory hides its curly head: