the corners.  The window-panes were small, and set in lead.  The curiosity of this room is, that it was once the residence of Pope, and that he here wrote a considerable part of the translation of Homer, and likewise, no doubt, the admirable letters to which I have referred above.  The room once contained a record by himself, scratched with a diamond on one of the window-panes, (since removed for safe-keeping to Nuneham Courtney, where it was shown me,) purporting that he had here finished the fifth book of the “Iliad” on such a day.

A poet has a fragrance about him, such as no other human being is gifted withal; it is indestructible, and clings forevermore to everything that he has touched.  I was not impressed, at Blenheim, with any sense that the mighty Duke still haunted the palace that was created for him; but here, after a century and a half, we are still conscious of the presence of that decrepit little figure of Queen Anne’s time, although he was merely a casual guest in the old tower, during one or two summer months.  However brief the time and slight the connection, his spirit cannot be exorcised so long as the tower stands.  In my mind, moreover, Pope, or any other person with an available claim, is right in adhering to the spot, dead or alive; for I never saw a chamber that I should like better to inhabit,—­so comfortably small, in such a safe and inaccessible seclusion, and with a varied landscape from each window.  One of them looks upon the church, close at hand, and down into the green churchyard, extending almost to the foot of the tower; the others have views wide and far, over a gently undulating tract of country.  If desirous of a loftier elevation, about a dozen more steps of the turret-stair will bring the occupant to the summit of the tower,—­where Pope used to come, no doubt, in the summer evenings, and peep—­poor little shrimp that he was!—­through the embrasures of the battlement.

From Stanton Harcourt we drove—­I forget how far—­to a point where a boat was waiting for us upon the Thames, or some other stream; for I am ashamed to confess my ignorance of the precise geographical whereabout.  We were, at any rate, some miles above Oxford, and, I should imagine, pretty near one of the sources of England’s mighty river.  It was little more than wide enough for the boat, with extended oars, to pass,—­shallow, too, and bordered with bulrushes and water-weeds, which, in some places, quite overgrew the surface of the river from bank to bank.  The shores were flat and meadow-like, and sometimes, the boatman told us, are overflowed by the rise of the stream.  The water looked clean and pure, but not particularly transparent, though enough so to show us that the bottom is very much weed-grown; and I was told that the weed is an American production, brought to England with importations of timber, and now threatening to choke up the Thames and other English rivers.  I wonder it does not try its obstructive powers upon the Merrimack, the Connecticut, or the Hudson,—­not to speak of the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi!