If I
had seen him take the sun out of the sky, and put it into his breeches'
pocket, I don't think I should have been in the least degree surprised.
Well, years after, when I had discarded my passion with my jacket, I
have assisted this middle-aged Romeo home from a roystering wine-party,
and heard him hiccup out his marital annoyances, with the strangest
remembrances of old times, and the strangest deductions therefrom. Did
that man with the idiotic laugh and the blurred utterance ever love?
Was he ever capable of loving? I protest I have my doubts. But where
are my young people? Gone! So it is always. We begin to moralise and
look wise, and Beauty, who is something of a coquette, and of an
exacting turn of mind, and likes attentions, gets disgusted with our
wisdom or our stupidity, and goes off in a huff. Let the baggage go!

The ruined chapel adjoins the ruined castle on which I am now sitting,
and is evidently a building of much older date. It is a mere shell
now. It is quite roofless, ivy covers it in part; the stone tracery of
the great western window is yet intact, but the coloured glass is gone
with the splendid vestments of the abbot, the fuming incense, the
chanting choirs, and the patient, sad-eyed monks, who muttered _Aves_,
shrived guilt, and illuminated missals. Time was when this place
breathed actual benedictions, and was a home of active peace. At
present it is visited only by the stranger, and delights but the
antiquary. The village people have so little respect for it, that they
do not even consider it haunted. There are several tombs in the
interior bearing knights' escutcheons, which time has sadly defaced.
The dust you stand upon is noble. Earls have been brought here in
dinted mail from battle, and earls' wives from the pangs of
child-bearing. The last trumpet will break the slumber of a right
honourable company. One of the tombs--the most perfect of all in point
of preservation--I look at often, and try to conjecture what it
commemorates. With all my fancies, I can get no further than the old
story of love and death. There, on the slab, the white figures sleep;
marble hands, folded in prayer, on marble breasts. And I like to think
that he was brave, she beautiful; that although the monument is worn by
time, and sullied by the stains of the weather, the qualities which it
commemorates--husbandly and wifely affection, courtesy, courage,
knightly scorn of wrong and falsehood, me