pasty composition and find
the substance hidden beneath, be it as crumbly and mottled as the most
luscious monument ever reared in honour of the feast of the Epiphany,
from the era of the Magi downwards. But so it may not be; the flinty
roughnesses of the past are hidden from our eyes by the soft covering of
refined stucco, and we must be content with the attempt of ingenious
modern masonry to give us an impress of what the castle called
Blanchflower was, in lieu of beholding it unspoiled save by the hand of
time. It is, however, something to know that there really does exist
beneath that outer casing, a bona fide mass of flint and stone, some
portions of which at least have stood, even from the days of the sea-king
Canute; by him raised on the site of the royal residence of East Anglian
princes, and yet earlier dwelling place of Gurguntus and other British
kings, and by him suffered to retain the name of "Blanchflower," first
given, so legends say, by one of its royal owners in honour of his
mother, Blanche, a kinswoman of the mighty Caesar. There it yet stands,
its very roots planted high above the topmost stories of all meaner
habitations, its battlements towering to the sky, as though climbing from
their earthen base through the turrets and towers, reared as a stronghold
for human pride and ambition, to heights that would rival the lofty spire
in the valley beneath, that blends itself with the heaven to which it
points in the solemn attitude of silent devotion, as if to ask, "Which
can do the greatest works, man serving man, or man serving God?"

With the monuments of two such spirits side by-side, fancy might wander
into perfect labyrinths of mystic and speculative thought, not void of
beauty, tracing the unseen workings of the spirit-powers there sought to
be embodied, each lingering about and shedding itself around the temple
consecrated as its shrine--devotion, yet meetly expressed in the tapering
spire--human Despotism and human frailty, finding in every age a fitting
representative within the lordly castles of the robber chiefs, from the
day when its walls formed the boundary of life to feudal wives and
slaves, and its dungeons, the tombs of vanquished foes, through every age
of its isolated grandeur, down to the picture of aggregated solitudes and
woes, that it presents in the character now assigned to it, of a
prison-home for criminals.

But for some such sense of the invisible links that make the present