Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges, those vast and incomparable
living museums which have been watchfully preserved by a whole people,
a people above all others attached to its traditions, they formed a
constellation of little towns, delightful and hospitable, too little
known to travellers. Each of them wore its own expression, of peace,
pleasantness, innocent mirth, or meditation. Each possessed its
treasures, jealously guarded: its belfries, its churches, its canals,
its old bridges, its quiet convents, its ancient houses, which gave
it a special physiognomy, never to be forgotten by those who had
beheld it.

But the indisputable queen of these beautiful forsaken cities was
Ypres, with its enormous market-place, bordered by little
dwelling-houses with stepped gables, and its prodigious
market-buildings, which occupied one whole side of the immense oblong.
This market-place haunted for ever the memory of those who had seen
it, were it but once, while waiting to change trains; it was so
unexpected, so magical, so dream-like almost, in its disproportion to
the rest of the town. While the ancient city, whose life had withdrawn
itself from century to century, was gradually shrinking all around it,
the Grand'Place itself remained an immovable, gigantic, magnificent
witness to the might and opulence of old, when Ypres was, with Ghent
and Bruges, one of the three queens of the western world, one of the
most strenuous centres of human industry and activity and the cradle
of our great liberties. Such as it was yesterday--alas, that I cannot
say, such as it is to-day!--this square, with the enormous but
unspeakably harmonious mass of those market-buildings, at once
powerful and graceful, wild, gloomy, proud, yet genial, was one of the
most wonderful and perfect spectacles that could be seen in any town
on this old earth of ours. While of a different order of architecture,