The deep consciousness that we are ourselves ruined, and that this world is a desolation more awful, and of more sublime material, and wrought from stuff of higher temper than ever was sculptured in hall or cathedral, this it must be that touches such deep springs of sympathy in the presence of ruins.  We, too, are desolate, shattered, and scathed; there are traceries and columns of celestial workmanship; there are heaven-aspiring arches, splendid colonnades and halls, but fragmentary all.  Yet above us bends an all-pitying Heaven, and spiritual voices and callings in our hearts, like these little singing birds, speak of a time when almighty power shall take pleasure in these stones, and favor the dust thereof.

We sat on the top of the strong tower, and looked off into the country, and talked a good while.  Some of the ivy that mantles this building has a trunk as large as a man’s body, and throws out numberless strong arms, which, interweaving, embrace and interlace half-falling towers, and hold them up in a living, growing mass of green.

The walls of one of the oldest towers are sixteen feet thick.  The lake, which Scott speaks of, is dried up and grown over with rushes.  The former moat presents only a grassy hollow.  What was formerly a gate house is still inhabited by the family who have the care of the building.  The land around the gate house is choicely and carefully laid out, and has high, clipped hedges of a species of variegated holly.

Thus much of old castles and ivy.  Farewell to Kenilworth.

LETTER XII.

MY DEAR H.:—­

After leaving Kenilworth we drove to Coventry, where we took the cars again.  This whole ride from Stratford to Warwick, and on to Coventry, answers more to my ideas of old England than any thing I have seen; it is considered one of the most beautiful parts of the kingdom.  It has quaint old houses, and a certain air of rural, picturesque quiet, which is very charming.

Coventry is old and queer, with narrow streets and curious houses, famed for the ancient legend of Godiva, one of those beautiful myths that grow, like the mistletoe, on the bare branches of history, and which, if they never were true in the letter, have been a thousand times true in the spirit.

The evening came on raw and chilly, so that we rejoiced to find ourselves once more in the curtained parlor by the bright, sociable fire.

As we were drinking tea Elihu Burritt came in.  It was the first time I had ever seen him, though I had heard a great deal of him from our friends in Edinburgh.  He is a man in middle life, tall and slender, with fair complexion, blue eyes, an air of delicacy and refinement, and manners of great gentleness.  My ideas of the “Learned Blacksmith” had been of something altogether more ponderous and peremptory.  Elihu has been, for some years, operating in England and on the continent in a movement which many, in our half-Christianized times, regard with as much incredulity as the grim, old, warlike barons did the suspicious imbecilities of reading and writing.  The sword now, as then, seems so much more direct a way to terminate controversies, that many Christian men, even, cannot conceive how the world is to get along without it.