Page:Old Castles.djvu/66

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58
Corby Castle.

less, dissimilar, disproportionate residuum, from which scarcely one element, or one true outline of the genuine feature of the life and knowledge that then were can be traced. With these thoughts, and many inexpressible ones, we turn from that old tree, feeling that

“There is a spirit in the pathless woods,”

and feeling also some sympathy with those old, old worshippers who found in trees and rivers the mystery and awfulness out of which they wove the garment of God—their grand, yet heartless God, of force of power.

All ways we look as we pass under these stately, solemn denizens of memorial and immemorial time, fearing lest we lose any of the imposing, soul-abstracting beauty they so abundantly display, our hearts o'er-brimming, although we have but just entered, with feelings which, like odoriferous incense, carry us away to the vast, the illimitable, to the heaven of an enlarged existence, far above and beyond the fret and fever of all our petty cares, and still pettier ambitions. Gliding on, for we walk as in a church, through these solemn aisles of prototypal ecclesiastical architecture, we come to the well—the Wishing Well we are told—whose cool crystal waters, together with the kindly placed cups, are an irresistable temptation to the summer wanderer. Nor did the majority of our party forget the Wishing business, which is done mentally before drinking—the taciturn bearing of the whole party of them respecting their wish causing much merriment. The Well itself is a cistern placed against the des-