Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me had magic in it.  The tapestried bed-rooms—­tapestry so much better than painting—­not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots—­at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally—­all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions.  Actaeon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas.

Then, that haunted room—­in which old Mrs. Battle died—­whereinto I have crept, but always in the day-time, with a passion of fear; and a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the past.—­How shall they build it up again?

It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that traces of the splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent.  Its furniture was still standing—­even to the tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there.  But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere.

The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration, So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay—­I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion—­half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy.  Variegated views, extensive prospects—­and those at no great distance from the house—­I was told of such—­what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden?—­So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls.  I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet—­

  Bind me, ye woodbines, in your ’twines,
  Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
  And oh so close your circles lace,
  That I may never leave this place;
  But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
  Ere I your silken bondage break,
  Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
  And, courteous briars, nail me through!

I was here as in a lonely temple.  Snug firesides—­the low-built roof—­parlours ten feet by ten—­frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home—­these were the condition of my birth—­the wholesome soil which I was planted in.  Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune.