There the most daintie paradise on ground
Itselfe doth offer to his sober eye,—
-----The painted flowres, the trees upshooting hye,
The dales for shade, the hills for breathing space,
The trembling groves, the christall running by;
And that, which all faire works doth most aggrace,
The art which all that wrought appeared in no place.
Faery Queene.
They had taken ship for London, as Mr. and Mrs. Carleton
wished to visit home for a day or two before going
on to Paris. So leaving Charlton to carry news
of them to the French capital, so soon as he could
persuade himself to leave the English one, they with
little Fleda in company posted down to Carleton, in
——shire.
It was a time of great delight to Fleda, that is,
as soon as Mr. Carleton had made her feel at home
in England; and somehow he had contrived to do that
and to scatter some clouds of remembrance that seemed
to gather about her, before they had reached the end
of their first day’s journey. To be out
of the ship was itself a comfort, and to be alone with
kind friends was much more. With great joy Fleda
put her cousin Charlton and Mr. Thorn at once out
of sight and out of mind; and gave herself with even
more than her usual happy readiness to everything
the way and the end of the way had for her. Those
days were to be painted days in Fleda’s memory.
She thought Carleton was a very odd place. That
is, the house, not the village which went by the same
name. If the manner of her two companions had
not been such as to put her entirely at her ease she
would have felt strange and shy. As it was she
felt half afraid of losing herself in the house, to
Fleda’s unaccustomed eyes it was a labyrinth
of halls and staircases, set with the most unaccountable
number and variety of rooms; old and new, quaint and
comfortable, gloomy and magnificent; some with stern
old-fashioned massiveness of style and garniture; others
absolutely bewitching (to Fleda’s eyes and understanding)
in the rich beauty and luxuriousness of their arrangements.
Mr. Carleton’s own particular haunts were of
these; his private room, the little library as it was
called, the library, and the music-room, which was
indeed rather a gallery of fine arts, so many treasures
of art were gathered there. To an older and nice-judging
person these rooms would have given no slight indications
of their owner’s mind—it had been
at work on every corner of them. No particular
fashion had been followed in anything, nor any model
consulted but that which fancy had built to the mind’s
order. The wealth of years had drawn together
an enormous assemblage of matters, great and small,
every one of which was fitted either to excite fancy,
or suggest thought, or to satisfy the eye by its nice
adaptation. And if pride had had the ordering
of them, all these might have been but a costly museum,
a literary alphabet that its possessor could not put
