George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[272] the Professor of Modern History, and two or three other professors. I was amused with the severity of their adherence to ancient customs and manners, and was somewhat surprised to find pipes introduced after dinner, not so much because smoking was liked, as because it was ancient in the usages of the club. . . .

My journey to the North was a journey of speed, and, of course, I saw little and enjoyed less. . . . . Two or three points and moments, however, I shall not easily forget. The first was York. I arrived there on Sunday morning, and remained until the next day, but I passed the greater part of my time in its grand Gothic cathedral. It is one of those great monuments of the ponderous power of the clergy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which are scattered all over Europe, and whose unfinished magnificence shows how suddenly this power was broken up. York is as grand and imposing as almost any of them, I think, unless it be that at Seville, where there is a solemn harmony between the dim light that struggles through its storied windows, the dark, threatening masses of the pile itself, the imposing power of the paintings,. . . . and the deep, wailing echoes of that worship which is to be found and felt, in all its original dignity and power, only beyond the Pyrenees. . . . Excepting that, I know nothing that goes before York. . . . .

The next point that surprised me was Newcastle. I merely passed the night there,. . . . but the appearance of the country about it was extraordinary. At the side of every coal-pit a quantity of the finer parts that are thrown out is perpetually burning, and the effect produced by the earth, thus apparently everywhere on fire, both on the machinery used and the men busied with it, was horrible. It seemed as if I were in Dante's shadowy world. . . . .