Europe show to
compare against such a tale?

Set against the Tower of London--with its 800 years of historic life, its
1,900 prisons of traditional fame--all other palaces and prisons appear
like things of an hour. The oldest bit of palace in Europe, that of the
west front of the Burg in Vienna, is of the time of Henry the Third. The
Kremlin in Moscow, the Doge's Palazzo in Venice, are of the fourteenth
century. The Seraglio in Stamboul was built by Mohammed the Second. The
oldest part of the Vatican was commenced by Borgia, whose name it bears.
The old Louvre was commenced in the reign of Henry the Eighth; the
Tuilleries in that of Elizabeth. In the time of our civil war Versailles
was yet a swamp. Sans Souci and the Escurial belong to the eighteenth
century. The Serail of Jerusalem is a Turkish edifice. The palaces of
Athens, of Cairo, of Teheran, are all of modern date.

Neither can the prisons which remain in fact as well as in history and
drama--with the one exception of St. Angelo in Rome--compare with the
Tower. The Bastile is gone; the Bargello has become a museum; the Piombi
are removed from the Doge's roof. Vincennes, Spandau, Spilberg, Magdeburg,
are all modern in comparison with a jail from which Ralph Flambard escaped
so long ago in the year 1100, the date of the First Crusade.

Standing on Tower Hill, looking down on the dark lines of wall--picking
out keep and turret, bastion and ballium, chapel and belfry--the
jewel-house, armory, the mounts, the casemates, the open leads, the
Bye-ward-gate, the Belfry, the Bloody tower--the whole edifice seems alive
with story--the story of a nation's highest splendor, its deepest misery,
and its darkest shame. The soil beneath your feet is richer in blood than
many a great battle-field; for out upon this sod has been poured, from
generation to generation, a stream of the noblest life in our land.

Should you have come to this spot alone, in the early days when the Tower
is noisy with martial doings, you may haply catch in the hum which rises
from the ditch and issues from the wall below you--broken by roll of drum,
by blast of bugle, by tramp of soldiers--some echoes, as it were, of a
far-off time, some hints of a Mayday revel, of a state execution, of a
royal entry. You may catch some sound which recalls the thrum of a queen's
virginal, the cry of a victim on the rack, the laughter of a bridal feast.
For all these sights and sounds--the dance of love and the dance