436 THE FLIGHT OF THE WOOD-NYMPHS. 



ful silken down in the fall of the year ; and the celastrus 

 grew with it side by side, offering its honeyed flowers to 

 the bee, and its scarlet bitter-sweet berries to the hand of 

 the simpler, or to the famishing winter birds. Among 

 this vinery the summer warblers built their nests ; and 

 numbers of them were revealed to sight when the foliage 

 was swept away by the late autumnal winds. 



The ladies of the mansion would not readily consent 

 to the removal of this old stone wall, with its various rus- 

 tic appurtenances, which seemed to them a part of the 

 original charms of the place; but they were soon con- 

 vinced that the villa ought not to stand in the midst of 

 such shabby " surroundings." They were plied with argu- 

 ments drawn from the works of men who had studied na- 

 ture in the galleries of art and through the medium^ of 

 canvas, and were persuaded to believe that the principles 

 of English landscape-gardening must never be sacrificed 

 to the crude notions of a poetic mind. The ladies gave 

 up their impulses in favor of the cold rules of professional 

 taste. The stone wall was removed; the- wild rose and 

 the eglantine were destroyed ; the flowering shrubs that 

 formed, on each side of it, a glistening row of bloom and 

 verdure, were rooted up ; a neat paling fence was erected 

 as a temporary boundary, and a hedge of buckthorn was 

 planted all around the old pasture ! 



The lawn in front of the mansion was enclosed by an 

 ornamental fence, and the narrow footpath that led up to 

 the rude doorstep of the cottage, meeting in its course 

 an occasional tuft of spiraea and low laurel, gave place to 

 a neatly gravelled walk, four feet six inches wide, and 

 shaped into a graceful serpentine curve. The enclosure 

 was filled with exotic shrubbery ; and silver maples, sil- 

 ver poplars, and silver firs stood at proper distances, like 

 sentinels to guard the portals of this temple. The grounds 

 were likewise embellished with statuary, and large marble 



