That I may never leave this place

I was the true descendent of those old W----s; and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places.

I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood the great gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the out-houses commence? a few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spacious.

Mine too, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars -- stately busts in marble ranged round: of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality.

Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not, I inquired not; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries back.

But, lest your fetters prove too weak,

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,

Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house with which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner of it had lately pulled it down: still I had a vague notion that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it.

Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one -- and then another -- would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognise the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the藏书网 vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity.

Then, that haunted room -- in which old Mrs. Battle died -- whereinto I have crept, but always in the day-time, with a passion of fear, and a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the past. -- How shall they build it up again?

And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln -- did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud Aegon ? -- repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped in his life-time upon my poor pastoral progenitor.

Ere I your silken bondage break,

Do you, O brambles chain me too,

Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion.

I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides -- low-built roof-parlours ten feet by ten -- frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home -- these were the condition of my birth -- the wholesome soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune.

And oh so close your circles lace

Curl me about, ye gadding vines,

And, courteous briars, nail me through!

If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe vanity.

The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had r九-九-藏-书-网educed it to -- an antiquity.

The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years that, though there lay -- I shame to say how few roods distance from the mansion -- half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me, and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects -- and those at not great distance from the house -- I was told of such -- what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden? So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison, and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet --

To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coat less antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbrays or DeCliffords pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? can it be hacked off as a spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter?

Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished `Scutc九九藏书网heon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters -- thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam" -- till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility? Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee.

It was no old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that traces of the splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still standing -- even to the tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere.

This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.

I DO not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy: and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty -- an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory -- or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on that of the preacher -- puts us by our bes藏书网t thoughts, disharmonising the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness ? -- go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church: think of the piety that has kneeled there -- the congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there -- the meek pastor -- the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee.

What, else, were the families of the great to us? what pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent elevation?

Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me had magic in it, The tapestried bed-rooms -- tapestry so much better than painting -- not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscot -- at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally -- all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actaeon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana, and the still more provoking, and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas.

That beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb -- that hung neat the great bay window -- with the bright yellow H----shire hair, and eye of watchet hue -- so like my Alice! -- I am persuaded she was a true Elia -- Mildred Eli九九藏书a, I take it.

Mine too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or self-forgetful maiden -- so common since, that bats have roosted in it.

Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be a hope -- a germ to be revivified.

Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction, at the plucking of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of the cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plat before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it about me -- it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a pannel of the yellow room.

Mine too -- whose else ? -- thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring woodpigeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery.