百度搜索 伊利亚随笔续集 天涯 或 伊利亚随笔续集 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.
I DO not knoleasure more affeg than te 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 plations on the great and good, whom we fan succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, inpatible with the bustle of modern occy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us betweeering ay and a crowded church. Iter it is <samp></samp>ce but some present human frailty -- an act of iion 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 best thoughts, disharmonising the plad 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 try church: think of the piety that has khere -- the gregations, old and young, that have found solation there -- the meek pastor -- the docile parishioner. With no disturbiions, no cross flig parisons, drink iranquillity of the place, till thou thyself bee as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee.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 rised 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 magnifice could not have been crushed all at oo the mere dust and rubbish which I found it.
The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to -- an antiquity.
I was asto the indistin of everything. Where had stood the great gates? What bouhe court-yard? Whereabout did the out-houses ence? a few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spacious.
Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion.
Had I seen these brid-mortar k their process of destru, at the plug 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 that ever hau about me -- it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a pannel of the yellow room.
Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me had magi it, The tapestried bed-rooms -- tapestry so much better than painting -- not ad 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 ce in a momentary eye-enter 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 ary ess of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas.
Then, that haunted room -- in whirs. Battle died -- whereinto I have crept, but always in the day-time, with a passion of fear, and a sneaking curiosity, terror-taio hold unication with the past. -- How shall they build it up again?
It was no old deserted place, yet not so loed 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 crumblihers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the ra will of every apartment, knew every nook and er, wondered and worshipped everywhere.
The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. Se 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 bouo the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strid proper prects, 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 Initus 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 drawhought, still closer the feny chosen prison, and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cture of those excluding garden walls. I could have excla<var></var>imed with that garden-loving poet --
Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,
Curl me about, ye gadding vines,
And oh so close your circles lace
That I may never leave this place
But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles me too,
And, courteous briars, nail me through!
I was here as in a loemple. Snug firesides -- low-built roof-parlours te by ten -- frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home -- these were the dition of my birth -- the wholesome soil which I lanted i, without impeat to their te lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the trasting acts of a great fortune.
To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been behe pr<tt></tt>ide of ary may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of aors; 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 i them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea? Is it trent to their swords? it be hacked off as a spur ? or torn away like a tarnished garter?
What, else, were the families of the great to us? leasure should we take iedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass mos? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a ate and correspo elevation?
Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished `Scut that hung upoime-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have I in childhood so oft stood p 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 m eyes; and of nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee.
This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable ge of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.
Who it was by dying that had earhe splendid trophy, I know not, I inquired not; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-staiold that its subject was of two turies back.
And what if my aor at that date was some Damoetas feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lin -- did I in less ear 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.
If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to plain. They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for a rifle; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe vanity.
I was the true desdent of those old W----s; and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places.
Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have gone iving them in fancy my own family name, one -- and then another -- would seem to smile, reag forward from the vas, the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the va their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity.
That beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb -- that huhe 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 Elia, I take it.
Mioo, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars -- stately busts in marble ranged round: of whose tenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowniy of Nero, I remembe?r, had most of my wonder but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the ess of death, yet freshness of immortality.
Mioo, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high-backed and wickered, ohe terror of luckless poacher, or self-fetful maiden -- so on sihat bats have roosted in it.
Mioo -- 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 pristiate to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretg 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 tre, 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.
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.
百度搜索 伊利亚随笔续集 天涯 或 伊利亚随笔续集 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.