American citizen. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 1864-1890, 1872-10-26
The Burning Of the EscuriaI.

| The news which this morning reaches
us of the destruction by fire of the mon
astery and palace of the Escurial strikes
in upon the heady current of the passing
its uproar of a day, like the funeral knell
of a great prince sounding suddenly and
deep over city gay with the professions
and the mirth of festival. The destruc-
| ton of any one of a grand cluster of his
| torical edifices, the names of which rise
up unbidden in every cultivated mind at
| the outset of a European voyage as goals
of interest and desire, would be felt as a
kind of personal loss by all such minds.
Westminster Abbey, the Tower of Lon
don, York Minister, NOtre Dame de Paris,
the mighty and marvellous Cathedrals of
Cologne and of Strasbourg, st. Peters
Church, the DuOmo of Milan n mount
Of marble, hundred spires'-the Mosque
of st. Sophia, the palaces of the Grand
Canal; the Alhambra--to think of the Old
World of letters and of story without
these glorious witnesses of all that kim
dies most the fancy and most stirs the
soul in the annals of the imperishable past
is like thinking of Switzerland without
her Alps or of the great lakes without
their greater Niagara. The civilized
world would have forgiven much to the
Commune that deserved no forgiveness,
had not the maddened insurgents destroy
ed in their madness the Tuileries and the
Hotel de Vile. s'We are such stuff as
dreams are made off, and the visible mon
uments of a bygOne age, while they re-
buke with their silent majesty the petty
vanities of our ephemeral existence, seem
also to assure us of something more dura-
BILE within us than the incidents and the
impulses of our own daily experience can
suggest. We venture to say that many
an educated man who has never with his
bodily eyes gaZed upon the venerable pile
of the Cathedral in which the great Eng
fish champion of tie Church against the
King gave up his life under the swords of
Henry's desperate knights heard with
something like pang of pain the news
which reached us the other day that Can
terbury was in flames. The ruin there
was stayed. But the telegraph gives us
no hopes of such a fortune to-day for the
palace-tOmb of the Houses of Austria and
of Bourbon; the grim, -ghOstly, sepul-
chral, but mysterious and in its own dire
full way fascinating monument of the
most cold and cruel prince who ever filled
q European throne.
Not by the folly or carelessness of its
guardians nor by the blind fury of a mob
has the Escurial persisted.
Fire from heaven has smitten it and no
filter fate could have been augured for it
by any one who ever wandered through
its corridors and courts having within him
any sense of awe and of mystery to be
impressed by its colossal gloom, its cOwled
and hooded sternness and severity of as
pect. How even fire from heaven can
have found food to feed upon in that huge
mass of sOmber stone and marble, indeed.
it is not easy to imagine. One would al
most as soon have expected the destruc-
ton by fire of The Pyramids themselves
As of this gigantic mass of masonry which
Philip, who tuilt it, firmly believed would
last as long as the faith he spared no hui
man effort to maintain, or the empire
which he deemed as lasting as his faith
N. Y. World, Oct. 3.