Fierce raged destruction sweeping o'er the land, As scales near equal hang the earnest eyes Eyes, hearts, and hopes paused trembling for the last. The pleasant hues of woods and fields were past, Leaves crumbled ashes to the air's hot breath, The sleepy birds, scared from their mossy nest, They dropt, and dying lick'd their masters' feet. And groaning agonies, too much to speak, From hurrying mortals, who with ceaseless fears Flying in all directions, hope-bereft, Follow'd by dangers that would not be left; Where none was nigh to help them when they pray'd. And buried deep the howling and the prayer Of countless multitudes, and closed-and then Open'd and swallow'd multitudes again. Stars drunk with dread roll'd giddy from the heaven, And staggering worlds like wrecks in storms were driven; The pallid moon hung fluttering on the sight, As startled bird whose wings are stretch'd for flight; And o'er the east a fearful light begun To heaven's midway it reel'd and changed to blood,- And with that light Hope fled and shriek'd farewell, While dismal faces on the darkness came, I felt all terrors of the damn'd, and fell And its live wrecks of souls dash'd howling as they roll'd. BRADGATE PARK, THE RESIDENCE OF LADY JANE GREY. "Ir any one would choose to pay Antiquity a visit, and see her in her grand tiara of turrets, see her in all her gloomy glory,-not dragging on a graceless existence, in ruined cell, with disordered dress, and soiled visage; but clad in seemly habiliments, bearing a staid, proud, and glowing countenance, and dwelling in a home that seems charmed, and not distracted by time:-let such a one go to the wooded solitudes, the silent courts, the pictured walls, and rich embrowned floors of Warwick Castle." This is the direction of a writer in the London Magazine. Let me have permission also to speak my advice to the reader. Reader!-Art thou a lover of those grand and melancholy places in which virtue hath thriven, or genius abided, or beauty reigned? Art thou a melancholy worshipper of the memories of the great and good, and wouldst have thy worship solemnized by scenes which are covered with gentle recollections, and which seem by their decay to have sympathised with the fortunes of their mortal deities? Go thy ways to the lone and melancholy ruin in Bradgate Park-walk in the majestic solitude of its strange and romantic valley-and hear and feel the wild evening voice of its brook. Or shouldst thou desire to remain by thy home-fireside, and to read-aye-read aloud of a spot which innumerable circumstances may prevent thee from visiting and wandering in; listen to one who owes it no common remembrances,-who gathered in its quiet unassuming paradise no common peace,-who went to it sick in mind and body, and who came away from it refreshed, even as the pilgrim that hath reached the spring, and is returning. It is now six or seven years, since, at the persuasion of some very kind friends, who, pitying the maladies, mental and bodily, to which I was a slave, craved of me to accompany them into Leicestershire, I first entered Bradgate Park. By some peculiar and early ties, my lady-friend was bound to this memorable place; and her family having sojourned on the borders of the park, she had in childhood become intimate with the deer-keeper (of whom I shall have hereafter to speak), and in his cottage she, her husband, and myself, were hospitably and quite happily accommodated. We remained there a month, and in that time I made a healthful acquaintance with the trees and with the air,—and indulged in a passion of the memory (if I may so stretch the phrase) for the birth-place, and the abode of the beautiful and the unfortunate Jane Grey-the daughter of the House of Suffolkthe lady of the noble Dudley-the friend and scholar of honest and kindhearted Ascham-the sweet and girlish reader of the Greek and the Latin, the Chaldaic and the Arabic! I visited over and over again every nook of the building, crumbling, ruined, and confounded as it is; and I wandered into every sequestered and romantic angle and upland of the forest,-re-building, by aid of that goodly mason, the imagination, each broken tower and disordered wall, and honouring some conceived window with the image of the gracious young creature, leaning her head upon her slight hand, which her curls seemed to chain and imprison to her cheek, and reading the Phædon in its mystic characters in the evening sun. Her pleasant tutor, for such I must call Master Ascham, hath writ that nothing could distract her from these her wondrous and unsexlike studies. Not the chiding of parents, nor the noble pleasures of the forest chace,nor the harmonies of youthful societies-nor the gallant example of her ladies, and the enchantment of the place. There she sat discoursing with the learned Greek, and fitting her young and patient heart for the philosophical regard of a bitter world which she had thereafter to encounter, and for the uncomplaining sufferance with which she met her fatal sorrows, and untimely death. How brief is beauty! This gentle lady had passed through the perils of infancythe tediousness of strict scholastic labour-the chidings, the remonstrances, the anxieties of parental care-the fleeting joy of her girlish love-the welcome and tender devotions of Lord Guilford Dudley-her marriage her wedded peace and happiness-the Mary-persecutionher fatal trial and condemnation-her husband's death on a scaffold-her own execution!-and all ere she was seventeen years of age. In this poor breath of life-this bitter instant -the most beautiful and sainted lady of England had suffered her birth and death. No mind that hath a thought-no heart that hath a feeling-but must in the lonely ruin of Bradgate Forest be made the better and wiser for its wholesome and searching associations. And I cannot conceive of that temperament so gay as not to quail on some jut of the rocks, or near some noising angle of the brook, and beget a seriousness and a sad vision of the hapless Jane; a seriousness better than all mirth a vision such as doth "rise without a sleep," and sweeter than all that can be called realized joy. I am becoming profuse too early in my remembrances of this lady, and am forgetting that all these thoughts upon fleeting mortality are as common to mankind as human calamity; and that even if they were not the tenants of every-day minds, they might be conjured up at the fireside, without dragging the reader to a far off forest, of which I have promised a description, and not a code of common morality framed within it. It is, however, next to impossible to write of this great ruin, and refrain from relapsing into recollections tender, visionary, and shaded. I will be "faithful" as my Polonius-humour for diverging will permit; but let not the royal tempers of my readers run riot and distract, if I am some what tiresome and prolix in arriving at my conclusions. I will keep to the pathway of the forest as steadily as I may; but if a dell diverts me,—if a silent fragment of ruin, the tomb it may be of some early architectural beauty, lures me to step aside, and struggle for its mystic inscription-let me be endured and forgiven. as I remember it was a very beautiful autumnal evening (I am strictly faithful in my relation of facts, however I may wander in my meditations,) when we left Leicester, passed through the turbulent and poaching little village of Anstey—about three miles from Leicester, as I conjecture, though for greater certainty, as the law expresses it, I crave leave to refer to Paterson-and descended the irregular and sloping field that leads down into the forest, and to the deer keeper's cottage. The sky was ruddy and rich, and looked as ripe as a harvest field, from the extreme heat and cloudlessness of the foregone day. The forest rose as it were from a depth beneath us, and displayed before our eyes clumps and extents of old noble trees,-openings of sallow and ripe grass, the silver threading of a perplexed brooklet, which was as narrow and meandering as a fairy's silken clue, unwound to conduct some favoured princess to her palace: we beheld distant and skybound hills-caught glimpses of a shattered building, standing in warm brown fragments of colour, in the very brick work that seemed, and always seems to me, an architectural history of the age of Elizabeth; and below us, in the quiet depth of the entrance of the forest, stood the cottage of the keeper, all alone, and sending its white wood-smoke up as from some domestic altar, in token to Heaven of peasant devotion, and grateful content. The keeper-worthy A (nay, why should I disguise a name which his manly, frank, and seusible mind may make him free to hear, and proud to have uttered?)—the keeper, Harry Adams,—I am now guilty of a familiarity which I never took in his presence,-had been on business to Leicester that day, it being market-day; and he rode just a-head of us on a switch-tailed old mare that might have carried old Roger Ascham for aught I could, by her apparent age, guess to the contrary. I drove a one-horse chaise, the first time I should think that ever so town-like a vehicle had convulsed its way through the pitfalls and fearful varieties of that amazing road. We talked little on our way, and rode with extreme slowness; indeed the hump-backed lane set its deformities against a trot. Adams ploughed his way before us with a serene gravity; and so, thought I, have I often, quite in my boyhood, seen the English husbandman ride homeward through the outskirts of my native town, slowly, pensively, 168 and alone, when I have been straggling back from the river bank on a Saturday evening, where I had been cozening the silly perch all the livelong holiday afternoon: such was indeed my thought! And, oh! how easily and well are opposite scenes joined together by some gliding association-even as you see in a theatre the separate parts of a wood, or of a heath, shot on and blended, by unseen hands, and as by magic. On arriving at the long old barred gate that pretended to protect the entrance to the farm-yard, our guide dismounted, and led his reverend mare through to an opposite wicket, disburthened her of her saddle and simple bridle, and showed her serene highness into the open park, where she just took one wholesome and orderly shake,-one look of luxurious indolence around her, and straightway proceeded to the cropping of her evening meal. Adams returned to offer us assistance, though I am vain enough to account myself a decent hand at harnessing and unharnessing a horse, from curb to crupper. Our horse being accordingly housed in a comfortable spacious stable, but littered with dried fern, instead of straw, at which I know more than one scrupulous nag that would have turned up the nose, spurning such a bed, we entered our worthy friend's cottage. We entered it through a maze of children, "each under each," and quite as tuneable as the beagles of Theseus. The eldest was a fine healthy rosy girl, of about twelve years of age, with handsome and regular features, and possessing that natural and retired modesty which seldom fails to accompany true youthShe stood ful grace and beauty. somewhat apart, looking with her shy dark eyes askance at us, like one of her father's fawns, from which she perchance caught this her so pretty air the while it came fearfully at the dawn about the cottage, to get bread from her hand, and to fleet away at This little girl held the sun-rise. a baby-sister in her arms, as like to herself as blossom is to blossom. Around the doorway crowded breeches-brother, and petticoat-brother, and pinafore-sister, and frocksister, and every species of this urchin genus, some with bread, and some without, but none wanting it! The bigger ones marveling at our Our tea was delightful, our butter |