f paddock and park;
and with some round-headed appearances of trees, and stately entrances
to houses of mark: the avenue at Bushy, and the iron gates and carved
pillars of Hampton,[128] impressing him apparently with great awe and
admiration; so that in after life his little country house is,--of all
places in the world,--at Twickenham! Of swans and reedy shores he now
learns the soft motion and the green mystery, in a way not to be
forgotten.

And at last fortune wills that the lad's true life shall begin; and one
summer's evening, after various wonderful stage-coach experiences on
the north road, which gave him a love of stage-coaches ever after, he
finds himself sitting alone among the Yorkshire hills.[129] For the
first time, the silence of Nature round him, her freedom sealed to him,
her glory opened to him. Peace at last; no roll of cart-wheel, nor
mutter of sullen voices in the back shop; but curlew-cry in space of
heaven, and welling of bell-toned streamlet by its shadowy rock.
Freedom at last. Dead-wall, dark railing, fenced field, gated garden,
all passed away like the dream, of a prisoner; and behold, far as foot
or eye can race or range, the moor, and cloud. Loveliness at last. It
is here, then, among these deserted vales! Not among men. Those pale,
poverty-struck, or cruel faces;--that multitudinous, marred
humanity--are not the only things that God has made. Here is something
He has made which no one has marred. Pride of purple rocks, and river
pools of blue, and tender wilderness of glittering trees, and misty
lights of evening on immeasurable hills.

Beauty, and freedom, and peace; and yet another teacher, graver than
these. Sound preaching at last here, in Kirkstall crypt, concerning
fate and life. Here, where the dark pool reflects the chancel pillars,
and the cattle lie in unhindered rest, the soft sunshine on their
dappled bodies, instead of priests' vestments; their white furry hair
ruffled a little, fitfully, by the evening wind deep-scented from the
meadow thyme.

Consider deeply the import to him of this, his first sight of ruin, and
compare it with the effect of the architecture that was around
Giorgione. There were indeed aged buildings, at Venice, in his time,
but none in decay. All ruin was removed, and its place filled as
quickly as in our London; but filled always by architecture loftier and
more wonderful than that whose place it took, the boy himself happy to
work upon the walls of it