of my Eden?--So far from
a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences
of my chosen prison; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture
of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with that
garden-loving poet--

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your 'twines,
Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
And oh so close your circles lace,
That I may never leave this place;
But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briars, nail me through!

I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides--the low-built
roof--parlours ten feet by ten--frugal boards, and all the homeliness
of home--these were the condition of my birth--the wholesome soil
which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest
lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond;
and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting
accidents of a great fortune.

To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been
born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than
to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coatless
antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a
Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm
himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit them. The claims
of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me
of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? can it be hacked off as a
spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter?

What, else, were the families of the great to us? what pleasure should
we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass
monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods,
if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent
elevation?

Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that hung
upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have
I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters--thy
emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam"--till, every
dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility?
Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights, hast detained my
steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to
dreaming on thee.

This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of
blood, and not, as emp