abbess, on the first vacancy perhaps, but it soon became evident that her affections did not that way tend; the religious world of England was suddenly surprised and horrified to hear that the Abbess of Romsey had been secretly conveyed to Flanders, and there married to Matthew, son of the earl of that country. To compel her return to the monastery under such circumstances, much less to punish the offender for leaving it, was out of the question; but if the lovers could not be prevented from living together, as they continued to do for no less than ten years, they could be harassed by the incessant interferences, and alarmed by the extreme denunciations of the spiritual powers; and these at last seem to have made their union unendurable. So, after the long period mentioned, during which two children had been born, the unfortunate abbess was fain to seek a reconciliation with the Church, by consenting to a divorce, and then returning to her monastery. God help her! There needs no record to tell us that she must have had a weary time of it for the remainder of her life. How strong must have been, after all this infidelity to religious vows, the faith in them, which could bring the sinner a penitent back again to the very spot of the transgression. Through this long gallery from whence we look down into the church below, the poor stricken countess would often pass along. Over those grounds and gardens then would she often walk; it needs not to tell, that one who could voluntarily resign her court, her husband, her children, to expiate an old transgression, would suffer fearful mental pains. We follow her to those hours passed before the cross and the shrine, those hours spent in cold, dark silence, in the cell. Was she shunned by her purer sisters? Did they treat her as the virtuous ladies of our day treat the poor outcast? Did they regard her as an unclean person and an adulteress? What extra penances were hers, by which she expiated the sins of years? Speak, walls, and tell us No!! Oblivion hath strewn her poppies over allover that first reception, upon her return, by the sister, now raised to her own old post of abbess, the dimness of that stern confessional, so terrible to her and the tears, the doubt, the maceration, and in the distance, the vision of the Purgatorial fires. Oblivion has sown her poppies over all. But every spot in England has its points of interest, every churchyard has some grave to which the mind turns with especial reflection; every village is the neighbourhood of some such haunted ground. And let them be kept alive within the heart, we say, only the more, because in our day there is too eager a disposition to treat with contempt the legendary recollections of ancient time, too great a disposition to slight as worthless the tales and the incidents which tenderly consecrate a building or a neighbourhood. For our own part, there are spots which we can never regard with ordinary emotion; the castled dwelling of the ancient Audley's, on St. Michael's Mount, its hall with the innu merable emblazoned shields, the chapel, the wall where, only a few years since, the figure of the monk, bricked up, met the view of the astonished bricklayers; and that wonderful old oaken bedstead, five hundred years old: the mind lives through a long time in looking at all these things. The fabled dyke of Sir Blevis and Ascapart, at Southampton, is not without its meaning, to the humble and teachable mind. We have been unable to repress the prayer on the spot where Hooker, in the very magnificence of martyrdom, suffered at Gloucester. We were compelled to impulses and stirrings of the soul, in the room in which Cromwell slept after the Battle of Worcester. We could but shiver in the small gloomy chamber where Rizzio was murdered, at Holyrood; or the spot where Becket fell beneath the blows of the knights, at Canterbury. The tottering figure of the grey old man Wolsey, will haunt us in Leicester Abbey, mere ruin as it is; he leans, to our eye, upon the abbot's arm beneath the gateway, and murmurs audible and dirge-like words. In Berkley and Pontefract Castles, our hearts are still startled by the shrieks of murdered kings; and the old Tabard, in the Borough, old Eastcheap, are and ever must be to us, the scenes of ancient revelry and importance. There is no illusion about these things, we only see the ruin, perhaps, we have only the poem, but the poem affirms to us the identity of the spot with these old revelries and merriments, and the ruins affirm to us the reality of the incident. Nature, too, appears to sympathise with the old transaction; the heart of the scene throbs as if in response to the ancient event. How often have we had to notice that the dark transaction was in harmony with the dark spot, and that tenderness responded to tenderness? Much of this is, of course, owing to that faculty of the mind by which objects are coloured to its liking; but not to this alone, for in the selection of a spot it will generally happen, that its character was in some degree harmonious with the events to be enacted. D 3 54 CHAPTER III. OLD CASTLES "Stately the feast, and high the cheer, A thousand torches flam'd aloof: It was in the reign of Stephen that the Castled Baron reached the height of feudal insolence and cruelty. John of Salisbury laments the evils of Stephen's days, which he had just passed; and in the Saxon Chronicles it is said"Every rich man made his castles, and held them against the king, and the land was filled |