Over the ocean - pt. 919 Author:Curtis Guild 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: EDINBVEGH. 47 CHAPTER III. Feom Penrhh we were whirled away over the rails to Edinburgh. Edinburgh is certainly a wonder — a wonder of historic interest, a... more » wonder of curious old buildings, and a wonder of magnificent new ones. Here we were in the very place that Walter Scott has made us long and long to see, and were to visit the scenes that were sung in his matchless minstrelsy, and painted in his graphic romances. Here was the city where Knox, the Reformer, preached, and Mary, Queen of Scots, held her brief and stormy reign. Here we were to see Holyrood, Edinburgh Castle, and a hundred scenes identified with Scottish history, the very names of which served to help the melodious flow of the rhythm of Scott's entrancing poems. With what wondrous charms does the poet and novelist invest historic scenes! How memory carried us back to the days when the Tales of a Grandfather held us chained to their pages, as with a spell! How the Waverley Novels' scenes came thronging into imagination's eye, like the half- forgotten scenes of happy youth, when we read of the bold Scottish champions, the fierce Highlanders, and the silken courtiers, the knights, battles, spearmen, castles, hunts, feasts, and pageants, so vividly described by the Wizard of the North! Here we are at a hotel on Princes Street, right opposite the Scott Monument, a graceful structure of Gothic arches and pinnacles, and enshrining a figure of Sir Walter and his favorite dog. The view, seen from Princes Street, reminds one very much of the pictures of Athens Restored, with its beautiful public buildings of Grecian architecture. Between Princes Street, which is in the new, and the old city is a deep ravine or valley, as it were, now occupied by the tracks of the railroad, and spanned by great stone-arched bridges. A...« less