Westminster Abbey

Its Memories and its Message

by Mary Sturgeon

Front Cover:

This is a very wonderful old book! This .First Edition. book was published in 1921 by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., Kingway W.C. & at Sydney. The book measures 8 5/8 inches by 10 ¾ inches and contains xi, 222 pages. The tan cloth pictorial cover shows signs of light soiling. The cover shows signs of wear to the edges, corners and to the top and bottom of the spine. The spine is tight and the hinges are strong. The pages are printed on a good quality, heavy paper and shows no signs of rips or foxing. The front free end page and back free end page are both .browned.. The frontispiece is .etched. and the remaining 15 illustrations are tipped in. Some of the illustrations are tinted, others remain black and white. Exceptions noted, the overall condition of this lovely old book is very good.


Spine

Contents:

  1. Light in the Mist
  2. Art is Long
  3. A Benedictine Monastery
  4. The Holy Place
  5. .We Praise Thee, O Lord.
  6. The Home of Freedom
  7. The Lady Chapel of Henry VII . I
  8. The Lady Chapel of Henry VII . II
  9. Live, and the Tombs
  10. The Spirit of a Nation
  11. The Law and the Prophets

    12. Bibliography


Title Page

Excerpt . Light in the Mist:
Through the enchantment of a London night the Abbey gleams like a lantern. Its great mass rises darkly beyond the symphony of blue and silver which fills the streets below it. Shadowy but majestic, mysterious yet immensely convincing, it looms over the surprising loveliness of the scene as Eternity above the little clamour of Time. The misty, atmospheric blues of nocturnal London halo the lamps and fill the intervening spaces with ethereal colour and deepen overhead to indigo. The wet paving of path and road, gleaming like faery gold, reflects the quick lights of passing carriages in shining procession. All down there is bright, moving, changeful; and behind the Abbey rears its silent and, but for the lighted window, almost unseen form, quietly opposing a sense of infinity to the transience flowing round its feet.

The light of its window is not so clear as the lights in the street. It does not penetrate so far, nor shine so steadily on daunting corners, nor search so inquisitively the faces of the passers-by. It is an older light than they, and of a different order from their cold, rational, inquiring rays. Filtered through colour soft and worm, it is like the glow of a home fire waiting there at the end of the road to welcome the children back from their journeying.
End excerpt


Title Page - Verso


Frontispiece . The South Ambulatory


Light in the Mist


Meditation . It is clear, therefore, that whatever one.s attitude toward monasticism, and whether or not one grants its large spiritual claims, there can be no question of the material benefits conferred by the Benedictine Rule at Westminster, as at so many other places. And inasmuch as there can be no beginning of spiritual growth until a sufficient material basis has been laid, therein at least profound gratitude is due. Newman, that Cardinal of the white soul and golden tongue, has distinguished the Benedictines from the other great monastic orders as the .poetical.: and this not only because they aspired to the tings that poets are supposed to desire, viz. the beauty of nature, solitude, and meditation, but because they cultivated what is supposed to be the poetical mind, repressing the inquisitive intellect and giving the emotions play in worship and in good works.


The Home of Freedom


The Chapel of Henry VII


The Vigil . Not many of the tombs, which should, according to the historians, be thee deadest of all dead things, have a special power to convey this sense of life. The most beautiful are of significance. It does not even require a visible monument, sometimes, to come home to us with force, as for example when we stand in the Chapel of St. Benedict and reflect on him, the founder of the Benedictine order. There is no tomb for him, of course in our cold northern island,; yet but for him the Abbey would not have existed, and the whole of Western civilization would have been a different thing. Edward III in 1355 brought here from France the precious relic of the saint.s head; and the Abbey long treasured it as one of its holiest possessions.

Note: The final illustration . Poets. Corner


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