about was
upon him; and his feet bore him instinctively into those narrow and
crowded alleys where swarm the poachers of the city--the trespassers and
anglers in the game preserves and streams of humanity. He had lost all
pleasure in his club; the most exciting themes of political life retained
no piquancy for him. His old friends ceased to find any pleasure in him.
He was become the driest of all dry wells. Poachers, and anglers, and
Methodists, haunted the wretched purlieus of his fast fading-out mind,
and he resolved to go to town no more. His whole nature was centered in
his woods. He was forever on the watch; and when at Rockville again, if
he heard a door clap when in bed, he thought it a gun in his woods, and
started up, and was out with his keepers.

Of what value was that magnificent estate to him?--those superb woods;
those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and _riant_ river coming
traveling on, and taking a noble sweep below his windows--that glorious
expanse of neat verdant meadows, stretching almost to Stockington, and
enlivened by numerous herds of the most beautiful cattle--those old farms
and shady lanes overhung with hazel and wild rose; the glittering brook,
and the songs of woodland birds--what were they to that worn-out old man,
that victim of the delusive doctrine of blood, of the man-trap of an
hereditary name?

There the poet could come, and feel the presence of divinity in that
noble scene, and hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create new
heavens and earths from the glorious chaos of nature around him, and in
one short hour live an empyrean of celestial life and love. There could
come the very humblest children of the plebeian town, and feel a throb of
exquisite delight pervade their bosoms at the sight of the very flowers
on the sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above them. And poor Sir
Roger, the holder, but not the possessor of all, walked only in a region
of sterility, with no sublimer ideas than poachers and trespassers-no
more rational enjoyment than the brute indulgence of hunting like a
ferret, and seizing his fellow-men like a bulldog. He was a specimen of
human nature degenerated, retrograded from the divine to the bestial,
through the long operating influences of false notions and institutions,
continued beyond their time. He had only the soul of a keeper. Had he
been only a keeper, he had been a much happier man.

His time was at hand. The severity which he had long dea