Saints and seraphs, such as they appeared to Fra Angelico, look in upon me through the stained-glass windows, that I may always read and study as if under their holy eyes. Ivy runs thickly over their deep arched recesses, and over the stags' heads which surmount them. In winter, little but painted beams and glow come through them. In summer, the oriel opens of an evening to show me the phantom ships that haunt the misty, dreamy harbor; and the lattices that look westerly over the lake-like mouth of the Charles, are seldom shut against the sun or moon.
The floor is smoothly paved with broad, square slabs of freestone, on which is here or there engraved one or another illustrious name, like a 'footprint on the sands of time,' with a date of birth and death. Tables that match the bookcases support portfolios containing allegorical designs by Relszch, Blake, and Albrecht Durer. On a writing desk, that was once Vittoria Colonna's, a little Parian angel holds my ink for me, kneeling as if to ask a blessing upon it, and to entreat me to blot no pages with it in the souls whereon I write,
Μηδἑ μουσἁ μοι
Γἑνοιτ ανιδὁς ητις υμνἡσει κακἁ
Before the reading chairs, plenty of tiger and leopard skins lie in wait to cherish the cool feet of students, but there is nothing to trip up my own, along the long diameter of the long oval room, if sometimes the fancy seizes me to walk up and down there for hours alone, listening to the 'voices' that are not 'from without.'
At the end opposite to the oriel, I have just had placed an organ, the twin of the new one at the Music Hall, except that the faces on the pipes are beautiful, and do not look as if it hurt them to pipe. The world may be too small; but the organ cannot possibly be too large. Malibran, Jenny Lind, or Mrs. Mott usually sings to it of an evening, accompanied by Franz, Schubert, or Mendelssohn; or Beethoven drops in to play one of his symphonies. Sunday nights, Handel performs upon it regularly for a choir composed of Vaughan, Herbert, the minister who chants 'Calm on the listening ear of night,' Madame Guyon, and Sarah Adams. Between their hymns, Robertson preaches a sermon and reads from the liturgy of King's Chapel. This service is designed as a special easement to the consciences and stomachs alike of those oppressed Christians, whom modern customs and physical laws impel, of an afternoon, to be dining and digesting precisely at the hours during which their pastors are unaccountably and unjustifiably in the habit of preaching.
The books upon the shelves, last not least, are less numerous than choice. Among them still are to be found the most masterly writings of the most masterly minds in the three learned professions, and the noblest treatises on the nobler of the arts and sciences. There are many 'chronicles of eld,' which, if not true, as the Frenchman said, at any rate 'méritent bien de l'être.' There are such few fictions as bear the stamp of much individual thought, character, and observation. Especially there is a great deal of biography; for biography is the great, all-embracing epic of humanity.
Two suits of armor stand on guard, one on each side, by each well-assorted bookcase. I always think it prudent to warn my incautious visitors that these are automata, wound up and set to deal a box with their gauntleted hands on each ear of each disorderly wight who puts a book where it does not belong.
Below my library, and beyond my courtyard, is a boat in which I row myself out in warm weather to visit my friends along the coast. When I ply the oar, the crab-fishery is unproductive, droughts prevail, and I am not often upset or drowned.
In my stable are sometimes to be found, eating unmingled oats, two tame ponies, Mattapony and Poniatowski. They take my invalid acquaintance out on airings in the daytime, and my lingering guests home at a reasonable hour in the evening. The coachman thinks it is good for the horses to be out in bad weather. He loves to wash the coach. For my own use, I keep a large dapple-gray, an ex-charger of the purest blood. He has the smoothest canter and the finest mouth that I ever felt; but, with decent regard to appearances, and my private preferences, expressed or understood, he never fails to prance in a manner to strike awe and terror into all beholders, for full five minutes every time I mount him.
In the common world, I myself am, I trust, often amiable—always in some respects exemplary. In my castle, I am always all that I ought to be—all that I wish to be. I am as stately as Juno, as beautiful as Adonis, as elegant as Chesterfield, as edifying as Mrs. Chapone, as eloquent as Burke, as noble as Miss Nightingale, as perennial as the Countess of Desmond, and as robust as Dr. Windship. I also understand everything but entomology and numismatology; and if I do not understand them, the only reason is that, as the dear little boys say, 'I doe want to.'