o have
paralyzed even time; the bloom yet dwelt in her unwrinkled cheek; the
mouth had not fallen; the faultless features were faultless still. But
there was a deeper stillness than ever breathing through this frame: it
was as if the soul had been lulled to sleep; her mien was lifeless;
her voice was lifeless; her gesture was lifeless; the impression she
produced was like that of entering some chamber which has not been
entered before for a century. She consented to my request to stay with
her all the day: a bed was prepared for me; and at sunrise the next
morning I was folded once more in the chilling mechanism of her embrace,
and dismissed on my journey to the metropolis.

CHAPTER VI.

THE RETREAT OF A CELEBRATED MAN, AND A VISIT TO A GREAT POET.

I ARRIVED in town, and drove at once to Gerald's house. It was not
difficult to find it, for in my young day it had been the residence of
the Duke of------; and wealthy as I knew was the owner of the Devereux
lands, I was somewhat startled at the extent and the magnificence of his
palace. To my inexpressible disappointment, I found that Gerald had left
London a day or two before my arrival on a visit to a nobleman nearly
connected with our family, and residing in the same county as that in
which Devereux Court was situated. Since the fire, which had destroyed
all of the old house but the one tower which I had considered as
peculiarly my own, Gerald, I heard, had always, in visiting his estates,
taken up his abode at the mansion of one or other of his neighbours; and
to Lord ------'s house I now resolved to repair. My journey was delayed
for a day or two, by accidentally seeing at the door of the hotel,
to which I drove from Gerald's house, the favourite servant of Lord
Bolingbroke.

This circumstance revived in me, at once, all my attachment to that
personage, and hearing he was at his country house, within a few miles
from town, I resolved the next morning to visit him. It was not only
that I contemplated with an eager yet a melancholy interest an interview
with one whose blazing career I had long watched, and whose letters
(for during the years we had been parted he wrote to me often) seemed to
testify the same satiety of the triumphs and gauds of ambition which had
brought something of wisdom to myself; it was not only that I wished to
commune with that Bolingbroke in retirement whom I had known the oracle
of statesmen and the pride of courts; nor even that I love