star disdain it, for as I walk along I
see it mirrored therein as clearly as in the waters of the
Mediterranean itself.

The old castle and chapel already alluded to are, perhaps, to a
stranger, the points of attraction in Dreamthorp. Back from the houses
is the lake, on the green sloping banks of which, with broken windows
and tombs, the ruins stand. As it is noon, and the weather is warm,
let us go and sit on a turret. Here, on these very steps, as old
ballads tell, a queen sat once, day after day, looking southward for
the light of returning spears. I bethink me that yesterday, no further
gone, I went to visit a consumptive shoemaker; seated here I can single
out his very house, nay, the very window of the room in which he is
lying. On that straw roof might the raven alight, and flap his sable
wings. There, at this moment, is the supreme tragedy being enacted. A
woman is weeping there, and little children are looking on with a sore
bewilderment. Before nightfall the poor peaked face of the bowed
artisan will have gathered its ineffable peace, and the widow will be
led away from the bedside by the tenderness of neighbours, and the
cries of the orphan brood will be stilled. And yet this present
indubitable suffering and loss does not touch me like the sorrow of the
woman of the ballad, the phantom probably of a minstrel's brain. The
shoemaker will be forgotten--I shall be forgotten; and long after,
visitors will sit here and look out on the landscape and murmur the
simple lines. But why do death and dying obtrude themselves at the
present moment? On the turret opposite, about the distance of a
gun-shot, is as pretty a sight as eye could wish to see. Two young
people, strangers apparently, have come to visit the ruin. Neither the
ballad queen, nor the shoemaker down yonder, whose respirations are
getting shorter and shorter, touches them in the least. They are merry
and happy, and the gray-beard turret has not the heart to thrust a
foolish moral upon them. They would not thank him if he did, I dare
say. Perhaps they could not understand him. Time enough! Twenty
years hence they will be able to sit down at his feet, and count griefs
with him, and tell him tale for tale. Human hearts get ruinous in so
much less time than stone walls and towers. See, the young man has
thrown himself down at the girl's feet on a little space of grass. In
her scarlet cloak she looks like a blossom springing out of a cr