Kingdom; and when they touch the
herbage or flowers of this earth of ours, whose lonely places they love,
then only are they revealed to human eyes--at all times else to our
senses unexistent as dreams!

A DAY AT WINDERMERE.

Old and gouty, we are confined to our chair; and occasionally, during an
hour of rainless sunshine, are wheeled by female hands along the
gravel-walks of our Policy, an unrepining and philosophical
valetudinarian. Even the Crutch is laid up in ordinary, and is encircled
with cobwebs. A monstrous spider has there set up his rest; and our
still study ever and anon hearkens to the shrill buzz of some poor fly
expiring between those formidable forceps--just as so many human
ephemerals have breathed their last beneath the bite of his indulgent
master. 'Tis pleasure to look at Domitian--so we love to call
him--sallying from the centre against a wearied wasp, lying, like a
silkworm, circumvoluted in the inextricable toils, and then seizing the
sinner by the nape of the neck, like Christopher with a Cockney, to see
the emperor haul him away into the charnel-house. But we have often less
savage recreations--such as watching our bee-hives when about to send
forth colonies--feeding our pigeons, a purple people that dazzle the
daylight--gathering roses as they choke our small chariot-wheels with
their golden orbs--eating grapes out of vine-leaf-draperied baskets,
beautifying beneath the gentle fingers of the Gentle into fairy network
graceful as the gossamer--drinking elder-flower frontignac from
invisible glasses, so transparent in its yellowness seems the liquid
radiance--at one moment eyeing a page of "Paradise Lost," and at another
of "Paradise Regained;" for what else is the face of her who often
visiteth our Eden, and whose coming and whose going is ever like a
heavenly dream? Then laying back our head upon the cushion of our
triumphal car, and with half-shut eyes, subsiding slowly into haunted
sleep or slumber, with our fine features up to heaven, a saint-like
image, such as Raphael loved to paint, or Flaxman to imbue with the
soul of stillness in the life-hushed marble. Such, dearest reader, are
some of our pastimes--and so do we contrive to close our ears to the
sound of the scythe of Saturn, ceaselessly sweeping over the earth, and
leaving, at every stride of the mower, a swathe more rueful than ever
after a night of shipwreck did strew with ghastliness a lee sea-shore!

Thus do we make a