149 
I’urned to flowers, still in some 
Colours goe and colours come. 
We must quit the garden’s trim walks and flower-beds, if we 
would seek our next fair subject in its favourite haunts; for the 
fragrant and beautiful Wall-flower, the Choiranthus Cheiri 
of botanists, loves to dwell amid the relics of past magnificence, 
to hide the dismantled ruins with its robe of green and gold, and 
to crown with its wealth of blossoms the mouldering walls and 
towers of our old abbeys and castles, where 
—— “ Beautiful it blooms. 
Gleaming above the ruin’d tower. 
Like sunlight over tombs.” 
I have myself gathered its exquisitely perfumed flowers on 
the Elizabethan Kenilworth • aye, even in her Majesty’s 
chamber, and from the far-famed and peerless banquet-hall 
{once decked with other fabrics than the interlacing stems of 
ivy and wild flowers) ; I have found it blooming on the 
crumbling battlements of Conway Castle; springing from 
crannies in the proud and royal Eagle Tower of Caernarvon— 
and many another departing monument of royal and feudal 
magnificence and might in Cambria’s mountain-realm; at 
Ludlow, the noble Castle Hall where Milton’s Masque of 
Comus was first represented, is richly adorned with the starry 
golden flowers. Goodrich and Ragland equally share its 
bright smiles illumining their dim recesses, and crowning 
either ancient Keep with annual garlands : at Chejostow, it 
enwreaths the dim prison-house of Henry Marten; at 
Tintem, — that relic of surpassing beauty,—the Wall-flowers 
