His object was to visit a homely old couple, who had, nine or ten years before, inhabited the great tower of the place, and had often kindly received him in his wanderings. They were a farmer and his wife, who rented the keep and other lands, turning the spacious and massive tower into an inconvenient farm-house.

De Vere remembered with pleasure the talk he used to have with the kind old man and woman, and the impression their singular habitation made upon him.

It was still the same as when he last saw it, though it had certainly undergone a strange metamorphosis since the days when "time-honoured Lancaster" kept royal feasting within its precincts. There were still, however, some remnants of the more modern days of Elizabeth ..

"An old buttery hatch, worn quite off the hooks;

And an old kitchen that maintained half a dozen old cooks."

There was, indeed, no

"Old study filled full of learned old books,"

but there was the same old Bible, in black-letter, with the chain which had once attached it to the clerk's desk in the church below; together with the same Pilgrim's Progress, and Gulliver's Travels; which latter used so to puzzle both the farmer and his wife in a winter's evening, to make out whether it was true or false. These were all lodged in the kitchen window, so high from the floor, and so deep in the wall, that a portable wooden horse-block always stood under it, to enable the farmer to reach them when he was studiously inclined.

The kitchen was at least sixteen feet high. A smaller room adjoining, but full as high, contained a bedstead as old as Plantagenet, with modern yellow woollen curtains, not a great deal older than the Restoration. This was lighted, far above man's height, by loop-holes glazed on the outside, save where "the temple-haunting martlet" had made its way through the aperture, to build its nest in security.

Here, for thirty years, the farmer and his wife had reposed, with nothing to disturb them within, and indifferent to the storms which often rattled without.

Above, a corresponding chamber served as a cheeseroom, and another as a granary; and the whole was so still, and so secluded, that one might have supposed it the

.

abode of the early inhabitants of the earth. This had never struck De Vere, when in his state of rusticity, as out of the common course. Returned from the world, and cognizant now of its thronged exhibitions, its strivings, and gilded trappings, the contrast forcibly engaged him. He questioned his old friends with his usual affability; but they were so impressed with the imposing air and countenance which a few critical years, added to education, had given him, that they viewed him with a sort of sheepish wonder. By degrees, this wore off; but the monotony and seclusion of their life, though they denoted no unhappiness, occupied as they were with their country gear, whispered him that those born in the world were made to mix in the world.

"Not, however," added he to himself, as he clambered to the leads of the tower to try to discover Castle Mowbray in the distance; "not as my uncle mixes in it."

That residence of his ancestors was indistinctly visible to the naked eye, though several miles off. Indeed, its site was pretty much the same as Tutbury, each being built on a sudden and precipitous ridge, overlooking a wide-extended plain through which the Dove and the Trent both meandered. But his friend the farmer now brought him an old-fashioned spying-glass, left there by some of the Vernons when they visited the keep; and through this he easily discovered, not only the white turrets of his uncle's mansion, but the terrace where he had so often walked, and the park where he had so often rode, with one with whom he felt as if he should never walk or ride again. The scenes, indeed, of his happiness with his cousin thronged upon and vanished from his fancy so fast that he thought them a dream.

"Alas!" cried he, "would that they had really been so!" and he descended hastily from the tower.

This distant view of the castle he had so loved filled De Vere with the desire of approaching it nearer, and as he had announced to his mother no particular time for his arrival, he resolved to make a circuit of some miles, in order, before he joined her, once more to visit that proud place, where not many months before he had been so happy, that his present lot seemed wretched by comparison.

CHAPTER VI.

DOVEDALE.

Haply this life is best,

If quiet life is best; sweeter to you

Who have a sharper known.-SHAKSPEARE,

THE beams of the sun had for some time sloped upwards, when De Vere left Tutbury Castle and recrossed the Dove, with a view to push on towards Castle Mowbray that night. The mood generated by his visit to Tutbury was not exhilarating. The contrast between the wild and bounding elasticity of his spirits when first he saw it, and seemed to take possession of all that he saw from it, and now, that he felt disappointed (for he did so) in all the hopes hitherto of his life, made his heart heavy within him. He revolved all that had passed since he first left the forest of Needwood; and, in a spirit of mortification, he could not help mentally exclaiming― "Roll on, ye dark brown years; ye bring no joy on your wings to Ossian."

He checked his horse for a minute, when he came once more to Sudbury, and lingered over that beautiful front, “looking tranquillity,” which had always pleased, but in his present humour pleased him more than the utmost sublimity of grandeur. There are moments, indeed, when the soul may be so pensively occupied with its own feeling, and that feeling requires so much the balm of quiet, that grandeur seems even offensive to it; and while De Vere loitered willingly beside the low gray wall that bounded this gentle though ample mansion, he would have passed at a gallop the façades of Versailles, or the princely elegance of Stowe itself.

Presently he again joined the Dove, and as it was scarcely a longer road to Castle Mowbray, and a splendid sun promised a long length of evening, he resolved to pursue the beautiful course of the river, through all its valleys, and along all its rocks, which, towards its source, render it so infinitely more romantic than when gliding gently through the plain. He was acquainted

with almost every one of its little intricacies and entanglements of wood and crag, and, with Cotton in his hand, had often lounged along the banks of Bentley brook, the favourite scene of that philosophic angler's recreation; or traced him to that philosophic retreat (now become so classical from his description of it) where he and his master* had mingled their minds in conversation, after the patient toil of their morning sport.

These haunts, however, had now become too involved and precipitous to thread them on horseback, and in the humour he was in, it even suited him better to pursue his purpose on foot. He dismounted, therefore, at the top of a steep ascent, from which he had to sink suddenly by a winding path to the brink of the stream, which had by this time become a torrent. For he was now in Dovedale, with whose beautiful varieties of wildness and cultivation, of tangled wood, of rock, and bursting cascade, many, perhaps, are acquainted. He there. fore cautiously proceeded till he stood on the very edge of the waterfall. It fumed and foamed, and rattled hoarsely from rock to rock, and led him along with it to the bottom, where it suddenly quitted its tumultuous character, and, as if by magic, became a smooth, untroubled, clear, and glassy stream, watering a home-view that was delicious.

It was a green glen, long, winding, and narrow, shut in by two steep banks, shaggy from top to bottom with copsewood, now in fresh leaf, with here and there an oak or mountain-ash, left for timber at the last falling, The whole space, from side to side, was perhaps not a furlong across; and the now sober river, full to the brim, wended along in silent and equal march through a mar、 gin of grass green as an emerald. By its side was a footpath so elastic to the tread, and so beset with daisies, that one would have supposed the fairy troop had made it their nightly passage as they coursed up and down this lovely dale. Hence, perhaps, its name of the Valley of Oberon.

The whole was a sight which no traveller of the world, whatever his business, character, or contemplations, but must have stopped to enjoy. The miser all shrunk, the soldier all rugged, or the politician all dazzled in mind,

VOL. II.-4

* Old Izaac

even the hardened sinner, or thief on a predatory expedition, would have paused to behold it, and forgot himself awhile in the gentleness of the scene.

We may suppose that De Vere could not pass such a scene unobserved in any humour. In that he was in, it was delightful to his senses; and while his horses, winding in the road above, only added a pleasant variety to the landscape, he sat down on a stone to indulge his reflections. To say his eye was not pleased would wrong the truth; but it was rather his eye than his memory. Several eventful years (eventful in his young life) had passed since he had sat upon that very stone, beholding the march of that very river. The stone and the river were the same; was De Vere so too? His mind, indeed his character, had undergone no alteration, but not so his hopes, or his opinions. He knew this, and he could not help thinking of this his native stream, as a contemporary poet thought of the Lodon, upon his rejoining its banks, on which he had been nursed, after many years of wandering in the world.

"Ah! what a weary race my feet have run,

Since first I trod thy banks, with alders crown'd,
And thought my way was all through fairy ground,
Where first my muse to lisp her notes begun!
While pensive memory traces back the round

Which fills the varied interval between,

Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.”

Remembering these verses with emotion, it is certain that De Vere, as well as Warton, in revolving his life, meditated on

"Much pleasure, more of sorrow!"

It must be owned, however, that in a succeeding stanza, the poet had an advantage which De Vere could not boast.

"Sweet native stream, whose skies and sun so pure,

No more return to cheer my evening road,

Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure,
Nor useless, all my vacant days have flow'd."

This last thought was not De Vere's; for, free as he felt that his life had been from vice or dishonour, he felt but too keenly that it had been hitherto useless, and his lot obscure. "Of what avail," said he, rising from his seat, and taking the footpath, "of what avail the advantages with which I was supposed to start,--high and