WARWICK CASTLE I KENILWORTH I STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 481 



holds 102 gallons, does any amount of credulity as to the digestive 

 powers necessary to sustain the Colossus who slew all the dragons 

 of his day. 



While I was at Warwick, I ascended on a fine moonlight evening, 

 the top of the highest tower, commanding the whole panorama of 

 feudal castle, tributary town, and lovely landscape. It would be 

 vain to attempt to describe the powerful emotions that such a scene 

 and its many associations, under such circumstances, awakened 

 within me ; but I turned my face at last, westward, toward my native 

 land, and with uplifted eyes thanked the good God, that, though to 

 England, the country of my ancestors, it had been given to show 

 the growth of man in his highest development of class or noble, to 

 America has been reserved the greater blessing of solving for the 

 world the true problem of all humanity that of the abolition of all 

 castes, and the recognition of the divine rights of every human 

 soul. 



This neighborhood is equally beautiful to the eye of the pictu- 

 resque or the agricultural tourist. I was shown farms on the War- 

 wick estate which are let out to tenants at over 2 per acre and 

 everywhere the richness of the grain-fields gave evidence both of 

 high cultivation and excellent soil. The chief difference, after all, 

 between an English rural landscape and one in the older and better 

 cultivated parts of the United States, is almost wholly in the univer- 

 sality of verdant hedges, and the total absence of all other fences. 

 The hedges (for the most part of hawthorn) divide all the farm- 

 fields, and line all the roadsides and even the borders of the rail- 

 ways, in all parts of the country. I was quite satisfied with the 

 truth of this conjecture, when I came accidentally, in my drive yes- 

 terday, upon a little spot of a few rods where the hedges had been 

 destroyed, and a temporary post and rail fence, like those at home, 

 put in their place. The whole thing was lowered at once to the 

 harshness and rickety aspect of a farm at home. The majority of 

 the farm hedges are only trimmed once a year in winter and 

 therefore have, perhaps, a more natural and picturesque look than 

 the more carefully trimmed hedges of the gardens. Hence, for a 

 farm hedge, a plant should be chosen that will grow thick of itself 

 with only this single annual clipping, and which will adapt itself tc 

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