CHAPTER IV.[ToC]
The sole thing connected with my days on this spot, attended by a satisfactory feeling, is the remembrance of my long and quiet evenings, when I did happen to spend the week in the parish. It was the only period of my life that I read to any effect, and I must own, that even then it was no fault of mine, for it was impossible to do otherwise.
I used to rise at one o'clock in the afternoon, and go to bed at five the next morning. As to late hours, as it is termed, I have no sort of compunction, so long as I do not spend more than the necessary quantum of the twenty-four in bed.
I was agreeably surprised with the number of works I crept through; among which, my favourites were Byron's works throughout, with his life by Moore; Butler's Analogy, White's Farriery, and Dwight's Theology, which last is as full of poetry as Childe Harold.
The last half hour of each night or morning, I invariably enjoyed with my feet on the fender, in dreamy contemplation of the past, wreathed in the fumes of a cigar, and soothed by the lowly and desultory murmurs of the geese in the straw-yard beneath my window.
At the distance of about two miles from me, was Winthra, a seat of his Grace the Duke of Northumberland. Though the smallest of his several domains, it was the most beautiful; nor was it diminutive, being six miles in circumference. This paradise was placed in the centre of a country which was hideous in the extreme. Here then, was "the diamond of the desert."
We may remember that, in olden times, the amorous Edgar, on the fame of Ordulph's lovely daughter, despatched a confidant to her distant home in order to ascertain whether her beauty was of such transcendency as report declared it.
In this spot, then, the ancient seat of the Earls of Devon, the future queen, Elfrida, lived. A park it has ever been, from that day to this; and as one winds his silent steps between the stems of the giant and ruined oaks, the impression is, that here the spirits of Druids linger and roam as the last refuge left them untouched by the hand of man.
It contained the two sides of an extensive valley, sweeping gradually down to the Winthra, a beautiful trout-stream murmuring along the ravine. The only inhabitant of the enormous mansion was a worn out and pensioned butler; so that my sole companions of the solitude were the deer, and these being never or seldom meddled with, had increased to multitudes; and when one observed the huge and lofty walls with which the whole was shut in, he felt indeed in Rasselas's happy valley.