She is thine own at last, O faithful soul! The love that changed not with the changing years Hath its reward: Desire's strong prayers and tears Fall useless since thy hand hath touched the goal. See how she yieldeth up to thy control Each mystery of her beauty: enter, thou, A vanquished victor. None can disavow Thy royal, love-bought right unto the whole Of love's rich feast. Oh outspread golden hair, White brow, red lips whereon thy lips are set With rapturous thrills undreamed of, past compare! Oh ecstasy of bliss! And yet--and yet-- What doth it profit thee that every part Is thine except the little wayward heart?
A peculiar charm hangs about an Elizabethan country-house.
The castles belong to an utterly different state of things and people--to a rougher, coarser time. Their towers and walls, where the jackdaws build in the ivy; their moats, where the hoary carp bask and fatten; their drawbridges and heavy doors and loopholed windows,--these all tell of the unrest, the semi-war-like state of feudal days, when each great seigneur was a petty king in his own county, with his private as well as public feuds, and his little army of men-at-arms ready to do his bidding, to sally forth and fight for the king or to defend his own walls against some more powerful neighbor.
The great houses of the eighteenth century have a different character again, with their Italian façades and trim terraced gardens, where the wits and beauties of dull Queen Anne's time amused themselves after their somewhat rude fashion. They speak of a solid luxury in keeping with the heavy features and ponderous minds of the worthies of those days.
But the Elizabethan, or even early Jacobean, house tells us of England in her golden age. The walls of red brick, gray with lichens; the rows of wide stone-mullioned windows and hanging oriels; the delicate, fanciful chimneys rising in great clusters above the pointed gables; the broad stone steps leading up to the hospitable door; the smooth green terraces and bowling-lawns, walled in, it is true, but closed with gates of curiously-wrought ironwork meant more for ornament than for defence,--all these serve to recall the days when learning and wealth joined hands with the Maiden Queen to raise England from the depths into which she had sunk--the days of "the worthies whom Elizabeth, without distinction of rank or age, gathered round her in the ever-glorious wars of her great reign."