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delicate spring, even more than the gorgeous autumn with all 

 her purple and gold. No frost can wither, no blast can scatter 

 such a power of blossoming as there brightens the day with 

 promise that the gladdened heart may not for a moment doubt 

 will be fulfilled ! And now we walk arm in arm with a venerable 

 lady along a terrace hung high above a river but between us 

 and the brink of the precipice a leafless lawn not of grass, but 

 of moss, whereon centuries seem softly embedded and lo ! we 

 are looking to the right down down the glen, and to the left 

 up up the glen though to the left it takes a majestic bend, so 

 that yonder castle, seemingly almost in front of us, stands on one 

 of its cliffs now we are looking over the top of holly-hedges 

 twenty feet high, and over the stately yew-pawns and peacocks 

 but hark ! the flesh-and-blood peacock shrieking from the pine ! 

 An old English garden such as Bacon, or Evelyn or Cowley 

 would have loved felicitously placed, with all its solemn calm, 

 above the reach of the roar of a Scottish Flood ! 



But we shall not permit the visions of gardens thus to steady 

 themselves before our imagination ; and, since come they will, 

 away must they pass like magic shadows on a sheet. There 

 you keep gliding in hundreds along with your old English halls, 

 or rectories, or parsonages some, alas ! looking dilapidated and 

 forlorn, but few in ruins, and thank heaven ! many of you in the 

 decay of time renewed by love, and many more still fresh and 

 strong, though breathing of antiquity, as when there was not 

 one leaf of all that mass of ivy in which the highest chimneys 

 are swathed and buried all the gables. Oh ! stay but for one 

 moment longer, thou garden of the cliffs ! Gone by ! with all 

 thine imagery, half-garden and half-forest reflected in thine own 

 tarn and with thee a glimmer of green mountains and of dusky 

 woods ! Sweet visionary shadow of the poor man's cot and 

 garden ! A blessing be upon thee, almost on the edge of the 

 bleak moor ! But villages, and towns, and cities travel by mistily, 

 carrying before our ken many a green series of little rural or 

 suburban gardens, all cultivated by owners' or tenants' hands, 

 and beneath the blossomed fruit-trees, the ground variegated 



