ny and fancy, though the author has long left the bowers
of the muses, and the harp of music, for the severe professional duties
of the bar. I have some pride in mentioning the name of Peregrine
Bingham, being a near relation, as well as rising in character and fame
at the bar. The verses will speak for themselves, and are not unworthy
his muse whose poem suggested the comparisons. The inscription is placed
over the large Indian shell:--
"Snatch'd from an Indian ocean's roar,
I drink the whelming tide no more;
But in this rock, remote and still,
Now serve to pour the murmuring rill.
Listen! Do thoughts awake, which long have slept--
Oh! like his song, who placed me here,
The sweetest song to Memory dear,
When life's tumultuous storms are past,
May we, to such sweet music, close at last
The eyelids that have wept!"
Leaving the small oratory, a terrace of flowers leads to a Gothic
stone-seat at the end, and, returning to the flower-garden, we wind up a
narrow path from the more verdant scene, to a small dark path, with
fantastic roots shooting from the bank, where a grave-stone appears, on
which an hour-glass is carved.
A root-house fronts us, with dark boughs branching over it. Sit down in
that old carved chair. If I cannot welcome some illustrious visitors in
such consummate verse as Pope, I may, I hope, not without blameless
pride, tell you, reader, in this chair have sat some public characters,
distinguished by far more noble qualities than "the nobly pensive St.
John!" I might add, that this seat has received, among other visiters,
Sir Samuel Romilly, Sir George Beaumont, Sir Humphry Davy--poets as well
as philosophers, Madame de Stael, Dugald Stewart, and Christopher North,
Esq.
Two lines on a small board on this root-house point the application:--
"Dost thou lament the dead, and mourn the loss
Of many friends, oh! think upon the cross!"
Over an old tomb-stone, through an arch, at a distance in light beyond,
there is a vista to a stone cross, which, in the seventeenth century,
would have been idolatrous!
To detail more of the garden would appear ostentatious, and I fear I may
be thought egotistical in detailing so much. I shall, however, take the
reader, before we part, through an arch, to an old yew, which has seen
the persecution of the loyal English clergy; has witnessed their return,
and many changes of ecclesiastical and national fortune. Under the
branches of that sol
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