ead on earthly ground, any more than we, approaching from the side of
modern realism, can overleap the gulf between our domain and theirs.
Yet, if we seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily be done.
Crossing the bridge on which we stand, and passing a little farther on,
we come to the entrance of the castle, abutting on the highway, and
hospitably open at certain hours to all curious pilgrims who choose to
disburse half a crown or so towards the support of the Earl's domestics.
The sight of that long series of historic rooms, full of such splendors
and rarities as a great English family necessarily gathers about itself,
in its hereditary abode, and in the lapse of ages, is well worth the
money, or ten times as much, if indeed the value of the spectacle could
be reckoned in money's-worth. But after the attendant has hurried you
from end to end of the edifice, repeating a guide-book by rote, and
exorcising each successive hall of its poetic glamour and witchcraft
by the mere tone in which he talks about it, you will make the doleful
discovery that Warwick Castle has ceased to be a dream. It is better,
methinks, to linger on the bridge, gazing at Caesar's Tower and Guy's
Tower in the dim English sunshine above, and in the placid Avon below,
and still keep them as thoughts in your own mind, than climb to their
summits, or touch even a stone of their actual substance. They will have
all the more reality for you, as stalwart relics of immemorial time, if
you are reverent enough to leave them in the intangible sanctity of a
poetic vision.

From the bridge over the Avon, the road passes in front of the
castle-gate, and soon enters the principal street of Warwick, a little
beyond St. John's School-House, already described. Chester itself, most
antique of English towns, can hardly show quainter architectural shapes
than many of the buildings that border this street. They are mostly of
the timber-and-plaster kind, with bowed and decrepit ridge-poles, and a
whole chronology of various patchwork in their walls; their low-browed
door-ways open upon a sunken floor; their projecting stories peep, as
it were, over one another's shoulders, and rise into a multiplicity of
peaked gables; they have curious windows, breaking out irregularly all
over the house, some even in the roof, set in their own little peaks,
opening lattice-wise, and furnished with twenty small panes of
lozenge-shaped glass. The architecture of these edifices (a vis