EECEEATIVE SCIENCE. 



S7 



rE'\'ENSEt CASTLE. 



THE CEASELESS WOEK OF THE SEA. 



EOCK-STBATA AND THEIE MATEHIAIS. 



Near wliere tlie Norman Conqueror first set 

 foot on English soil, stands an old and stately 

 ruin that, 



" Lifting its foreliead gray, 

 Smiles at the tempest and Time's sweeping sway." 



Eoman tiles, peering with, ruddy faces through 

 the " ivy green " mantling the stately walls, 

 point to its first founders and to its ancient 

 prime and glory ; while the great masses of 

 neatly-trimmed and close-fitting squares of 

 Caen stone show the extensive additions made 

 by the martial men of a later age, who pos- 

 sessed and renovated the fortress. 



Before those lichen-covered walls the red- 

 haired Norman king encamped, when within 

 their protecting range the ambitious Odo 

 sought refuge. Stephen, too, sat down before 

 them ; and from those grass-grown parapets 

 and bastions, the bright eyes of the lovely 

 maids of Provence, whom Peter of Savoy 

 brought over to wed to English lords, looked 

 out, six hundred years ago upon a damp and 

 oozy tract around. 



Through those gapped and crumbling 



walls the "bleak winds wafted from the 

 main" now sigh and moan, and rushing on, 

 press down the tall, rank grass on the nume- 

 rous hummocks that dot the surface of the 

 marshy plain. These, when the brazen 

 helmets of the Eoman sentinels glittered on 

 those solid buttress-towers, were little islets 

 in a great and shallow bay ; and the river, 

 which now travels through a long and arti- 

 ficial channel to the sea, flowed down close 

 by the castrum-walls, and formed a Eomau 

 naval port. 



While thus the waters of the daily tides 

 flowed and ebbed around the hummock-isles, 

 a solid buttress of the Eoman fortress, under- 

 mined, fell out, and tumbled sidelong on the 

 muddy slope. So the Normans found it, and 

 when they mended up the cracks in the old 

 masonry and extended the works, they built 

 up, erect and strong, a sallyport over the 

 prostrate mass. 



Gradually, slowly btit surely, and cer- 

 tainly, from the time when Eoman hands 

 surrounded the island-hummock with its 



Voi„ I.— iS^o. 2. 



