he
creed in which you have been nurtured is not so terrific as to doubt
respecting the intellectual vigour on whose strength you have staked
your happiness. Yet these were mighty ones; perhaps the records of the
world will not yield us threescore to be their mates! Then tremble, ye
whose cheek glows too warmly at their names! Who would be more than man
should fear lest he be less.

Yet there is hope, there should be happiness, for them, for all. Kind
Nature, ever mild, extends her fond arms to her truant children, and
breathes her words of solace. As we weep on her indulgent and maternal
breast, the exhausted passions, one by one, expire like gladiators in
yon huge pile that has made barbarity sublime. Yes! there is hope and
joy; and it is here!

Where the breeze wanders through a perfumed sky, and where the beautiful
sun illumines beauty.

On the poet's farm and on the conqueror's arch thy beam is lingering!
It lingers on the shattered porticoes that once shrouded from thy
o'erpowering glory the lords of earth; it lingers upon the ruined
temples that even in their desolation are yet sacred! 'Tis gone, as
if in sorrow! Yet the woody lake still blushes with thy warm kiss; and
still thy rosy light tinges the pine that breaks the farthest heaven!

A heaven all light, all beauty, and all love! What marvel men should
worship in these climes? And lo! a small and single cloud is sailing in
the immaculate ether, burnished with twilight, like an Olympian chariot
from above, with the fair vision of some graceful god!

It is the hour that poets love; but I crush thoughts that rise from out
my mind, like nymphs from out their caves, when sets the sun. Yes, 'tis
a blessing here to breathe and muse. And cold his clay, indeed, who does
not yield to thy Ausonian beauty! Clime where the heart softens and the
mind expands! Region of mellowed bliss! O most enchanting land!

But we are at the park gates.

They whirled along through a park which would have contained half a
hundred of those Patagonian paddocks of modern times which have usurped
the name. At length the young Duke was roused from his reverie
by Carlstein, proud of his previous knowledge, leaning over and
announcing--

'Chateau de Dacre, your Grace!'

The Duke looked up. The sun, which had already set, had tinged with a
dying crimson the eastern sky, against which rose a princely edifice.
Castle Dacre was the erection of Vanbrugh, an imaginative artist,
whose critic