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.

VOL. III.

CHAPTER III.

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 re-crossed 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 grey 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 vallies, and along all its rocks, which, towards its source, render it so infinitely more romantic than when gliding gently through the plain. quainted with almost every one of

He was ac

its little in

tricacies 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, therefore, cautiously proceeded till he stood on the very edge of the water-fall. 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 tumultu

* Oid Izaac.

ous 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 copse wood, 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 margin of grass, green as an emerald. By its side, was a foot-path, 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, 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