was formerly the great dining hall, where
Elizabeth feasted in the midst of her lords and ladies, and where every
stone had rung to the sound of merriment and revelry. The windows are
broken out; it is roofless and floorless, waving and rustling with
pendent ivy, and vocal with the song of hundreds of little birds.

We wandered from room to room, looking up and seeing in the walls the
desolate fireplaces, tier over tier, the places where the beams of the
floors had gone into the walls, and still the birds continued their
singing every where.

Nothing affected me more than this ceaseless singing and rejoicing of
birds in these old gray ruins. They seemed so perfectly joyous and happy
amid the desolations, so airy and fanciful in their bursts of song, so
ignorant and careless of the deep meaning of the gray desolation around
them, that I could not but be moved. It was nothing to them how these
stately, sculptured walls became lonely and ruinous, and all the weight
of a thousand thoughts and questionings which arise to us is never even
dreamed by them. They sow not, neither do they reap, but their heavenly
Father feeds them; and so the wilderness and the desolate place is glad
in them, and they are glad in the wilderness and desolate place.

It was a beautiful conception, this making of birds. Shelley calls them
"imbodied joys;" and Christ says, that amid the vaster ruins of man's
desolation, ruins more dreadfully suggestive than those of sculptured
frieze and architrave, we can yet live a bird's life of unanxious joy;
or, as Martin Luther beautifully paraphrases it, "We can be like a bird,
that sits singing on his twig and lets God think for him."

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