ual enjoyment, will echo and re-echo the benison.

A little way farther, and a turn to the left leads to another spot
consecrated by genius,--Woodcot, where Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton passed
the earlier years of his married life, and wrote several of his most
powerful novels. I have always thought that the scenery of Paul Clifford
caught some of its tone from that wild and beautiful country, for wild
and beautiful it is. The terrace in the grounds commands a most
extensive prospect; and beneath a clump of trees on the common behind
the house, is the only spot where on a clear day Windsor may be seen on
one side, and Oxford on the other,--looking almost like the domes, and
towers, and pinnacles that sometimes appear in the clouds--a fairy
picture that the next breeze may waft away! This beautiful residence
stands so high, that one of its former possessors, Admiral Fraser
(grandfather to that dear friend of mine who is the present owner),
could discover Woodcot Clump from the mast of his own ship at Spithead,
a distance of sixty miles.

Wyfold's Court, another pretty place a little farther on, which also
belonged once to a most dear friend, possesses the finest Wych-elms in
England. Artists come from far and near to paint these stately trees,
whose down-dropping branches and magnificent height are at once so
graceful and so rich. They are said always to indicate ecclesiastical
possession, but no trace of such dependency is to be found in the
title-deeds, or in the tenure by which in feudal times the lands were
held,--that of presenting a rose to the King, should he pass by a
certain road on a May-day.

And now we approach Rotherfield Grays,--its bowery lanes, its wild
rugged commons, and its vast beech woods, from the edge of which
projects every here and there a huge cherry-tree, looking, in the
blossoming springtime, as if carved in ivory, so exquisite is the
whiteness, casting upon the ferny-turf underneath showers of snowy
petals that blanch the very ground, and diffusing around an almond-like
odor, that mingles with the springing thyme and the flowering gorse, and
loads the very air with heavy balm.

Exquisite is the pleasantness of these beech woods, where the light is
green from the silky verdure of the young leaves, and where the mossy
wood-paths are embroidered with thousands of flowers, from the earliest
violet and primrose, the wood-anemone, the wood-sorrel, the daffodil,
and the wild hyacinth of spring, to t