seem to me to have a beauty and a worth about them entirely independent of their moral character. That ethereal power which shows itself in Greek sculpture and Gothic architecture, in Rubens, Shakspeare, and Mozart, has a quality to me inexpressibly admirable and lovable. We may say, it is true, that there is no moral excellence in it; but none the less do we admire it. God has made us so that we cannot help loving it; our souls go forth to it with an infinite longing, nor can that longing be condemned. That mystic quality that exists in these souls is a glimpse and intimation of what exists in Him in full perfection. If we remember this we shall not lose ourselves in admiration of worldly genius, but be led by it to a better understanding of what He is, of whom all the glories of poetry and art are but symbols and shadows.

LETTER XI.

DEAR H.:

From Stratford we drove to Warwick, (or "Warrick,” as they call it here.) This town stands on a rocky hill on the banks of the Avon, and is quite a considerable place, for it returns two members to Parliament, and has upwards of ten thousand inhabitants; and also has some famous manufactories of wool combing and spinning. But what we came to see was the castle. We drove up to the Warwick Arms, which is the principal hotel in the place; and, finding that we were within the hours appointed for exhibition, we went immediately.

With my head in a kind of historical mist, full of images of York and Lancaster, and Red and White Roses, and Warwick the king maker, I looked up to the towers and battlements of the old castle. We went in through a passage way cut in solid rock, about twenty feet deep, and I should think fifty long. These walls were entirely covered with ivy, hanging down like green streamers; gentle and peaceable pennons these are, waving and whispering that the old war times are gone.

At the end of this passage there is a drawbridge over what was formerly the moat, but which is now grassed and planted with shrubbery. Up over our heads we saw the great iron teeth of the portcullis. A rusty old giant it seemed up there, like Pope and Pagan in Pilgrim's Progress, finding no scope for himself in these peaceable times.

When we came fairly into the court yard of the castle, a scene of magnificent beauty opened before us. I cannot describe it minutely. The principal features are the battlements, towers, and turrets of the old feudal castle, encompassed by grounds on which has been expended all that princely art of landscape gardening for which England is famous - leafy thickets, magnificent trees, openings, and vistas of verdure, and wide sweeps of grass, short, thick, and vividly green, as the velvet moss we sometimes see growing on rocks in New England. Grass is an art and a science in England - it is an institution. The pains that are taken in sowing, tending, cutting, clipping, rolling, and otherwise nursing and coaxing

it, being seconded by the misty breath and often falling tears of the climate, produce results which must be seen to be ap preciated.

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So again of trees in England. Trees here are an order of nobility; and they wear their crowns right kingly. A few years ago, when Miss Sedgwick was in this country, while admiring some splendid trees in a nobleman's park, a lady standing by said to her encouragingly, "O, well, I suppose your trees in America will be grown up after a while!" Since that time another style of thinking of America has come up, and the remark that I most generally hear made is, "O, I suppose we cannot think of showing you any thing in the way of trees, coming as you do from America!" Throwing out of account, however, the gigantic growth of our western river bottoms, where I have seen sycamore trunks twenty feet in diameter - leaving out of account, I say, all this mammoth arboria, these English parks have trees as fine and as effective, of their kind, as any of ours; and when I say their trees are an order of nobility, I mean that they pay a reverence to them such as their magnificence deserves. Such elms as adorn the streets of New Haven, or overarch the meadows of Andover, would in England be considered as of a value which no money could represent; no pains, no expense would be spared to preserve their life and health; they would never be shot dead by having gas pipes laid under them, as they have been in some of our New England towns; or suffered to be devoured by canker worms for want of any amount of money spent in their defence.

Some of the finest trees in this place are magnificent cedars of Lebanon, which bring to mind the expression in Psalms, "Excellent as the cedars." They are the very impersonation

of kingly majesty, and are fitted to grace the old feudal stronghold of Warwick the king maker. These trees, standing as they do amid magnificent sweeps and undulations of lawn, throwing out their mighty arms with such majestic breadth and freedom of outline, are themselves a living, growing, historical epic. Their seed was brought from Holy Land in the old days of the crusades; and a hundred legends might be made up of the time, date, and occasion of their planting. These crusades have left their mark every where through Europe, from the cross panel on the doors of common houses to the oriental touches and arabesques of castles and cathedrals.

In the reign of Stephen there was a certain Roger de Newburg, second Earl of Warwick, who appears to have been an exceedingly active and public-spirited character; and, besides conquering part of Wales, founded in this neighborhood various priories and hospitals, among which was the house of the Templars, and a hospital for lepers. He made several pilgrimages to Holy Land; and so I think it as likely as most theories that he ought to have the credit of these cedars.

These Earls of Warwick appear always to have been remarkably stirring men in their day and generation, and foremost in whatever was going on in the world, whether political or religious. To begin, there was Guy, Earl of Warwick, who lived somewhere in the times of the old dispensation, before King Arthur, and who distinguished himself, according to the fashion of those days, by killing giants and various colored dragons, among which a green one especially figures. It appears that he slew also a notable dun cow, of a kind of mastodon breed, which prevailed in those early days, which was making great havoc in the neighborhood. In later times, when the giants, dragons, and other animals of that sort