and, except on Sundays, when the nailer lads get into them, when they can, few people come their way. Squire Shenstone was a poet," she added, "and died for love." This was not quite the case: the Squire, who might have married his Phillis had he not been afraid to incur the expense of a wife, died of a putrid fever at the sober age of forty-nine; but there would have been little wit in substituting a worse for a better story, and so I received without challenge the information of the spinster. In descending, I took the right-hand branch of the valley, which is considerably more extended than that to the left. A low cliff, composed of the yellow gritty sandstone of the Lower Coal Measures, and much overhung by stunted alder and hazel bushes, stands near the head of the ravine, just where the Leasowes begin; and directly out of the middle of the cliff, some three or four feet from its base, there comes leaping to the light, as out of the smitten rock in the wilderness, a clear and copious spring, - one of the "health-bestowing" fountains,

"All bordered with moss,

Where the harebells and violets grew."

Alas! moss, and harebells, and violets, were gone, with the path which had once led to the spot, and the seat which had once fronted it; the waters fell dead and dull into a quagmire, like young human life leaping out of unconscious darkness into misery, and then stole away through a boggy strip of rank grass and rushes, along a line of scraggy alders. All was changed, save the full-volumed spring, and it,

"A thousand and a thousand years,

"T will flow as now it flows."

-

CHAPTER IX.

Detour. The Leasowes deteriorated wherever the Poet had built, and improved wherever he had planted. — View from the Hanging Wood. Stratagem of the Island Screen. Virgil's Grave. - Mound of the Hales Owen and Birmingham Canal; its sad Interference with Shenstone's Poetic Description of the Infancy of the Stour.- Vanished Cascade and Root-house. - Somerville's Urn. "To all Friends round the Wrekin."- - River Scenery of the Leasowes; their great Variety. — Peculiar Arts of the Poet; his Vistas, when seen from the wrong end, Realizations of Hogarth's Caricature. - Shenstone the greatest of Landscape Gardeners. - Estimate of Johnson. - Goldsmith's History of the Leasowes; their after History.

THE water creeps downwards from where it leaps from the rock, to form a chain of artificial lakes, with which the bottom of the dell is occupied, and which are threaded by the watercourse, like a necklace of birds' eggs strung upon a cord. Ere I struck down on the upper lake, however, I had to make a detour of a few hundred yards to the right, to see what Dodsley describes as one of the finest scenes furnished by the Leasowes, - a steep terrace, commanding a noble prospect, a hanging wood, an undulating pathway over uneven ground, that rises and falls like a snake in motion, a monumental tablet, — three rustic seats, and a temple dedicated to Pan. The happy corner which the poet had thus bravery is naturally a very pretty one.

stuck over with so much

The hill-side, so gentle

in most of its slopes, descends for about eighty feet, nearly at right angles with the forked valley, and nearly parallel to the great valley in front, - as if it were a giant wave on the eve of breaking; and it is on this steep rampart-like declivity,

this giant wave, that the hanging wood was planted, the undulating path formed, and the seats and temple erected. But all save the wood has either wholly vanished, or left behind but the faintest traces, traces so faint that, save for the plan of the grounds appended to the second edition of Dodsley's description, they would have told me no distinct story.

Ere descending the rampart-like acclivity, but just as the ground begins gradually to rise, and when I should be passing, according to Dodsley, through the "Lover's Walk,” a sequestered arboraceous lane, saddened by the urn of " "poor Miss

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Dolman," - by the side of which" there had flowed "a small bubbling rill, forming little peninsulas, rolling over pebbles, or falling down small cascades, all under cover, and taught to murmur very agreeably,"-1 found myself in a wild tangled jungle, with no path under foot, with the "bubbling rill" converted into a black, lazy swamp, with thickets of bramble all around, through which I had to press my way, as I best could, breast-high," poor Miss Dolman's" urn as fairly departed and invisible as "poor Miss Dolman ;" in short, everything that had been done undone, and all in readiness for some second Shenstone to begin de novo. As the way steepened, and the rank aquatic vegetation of the swamp, once a runnel, gave place to plants that affect a drier habitat, I could detect in the hollow of the hill some traces of the old path; but the place forms a receptacle into which the gusty winter winds sweep the shorn leafage of the hanging wood above, and so I had to stalk along the once trimly-kept walk, through a stratum of decayed leaves, half-leg deep. In the middle of the hanging wood I found what had been once the temple of Pan. There is a levelled space on the declivity, about half the size of an ordinary sitting parlor: the winds had swept it bare; and there, distinctly visible on three sides of the area, are the

foun ations of a thin brick wall, that, where least broken, rises some six or eight inches above the level. A little further on, where the wood opens on one of the loveliest prospects I ever beheld, I found a decayed oak-post remaining, to indicate the locale of a seat that had once eulogized the landscape which it fronted in a classic Latin inscription. But both seat and inscription are gone. And yet, maugre this desolation, not in the days of Shenstone did the Leasowes look so nobly from this elevation as they did this day. I was forcibly reminded of one of the poet's own remarks, and the completeness of its realization: "The works of a person that builds," he says, "begin immediately to decay; while those of him who plants. begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building." The trees of the Leasowes, when the Leasowes formed the home and furnished the employment of the poet, seem to have been mere saplings. We find him thus writing to a friend in the summer of 1743: :"A malignant caterpillar has demolished the beauty of all our large oaks. Mine are secured by their littleness. But I guess Hagley Park suffers, a large wood near me being a winterpiece for nakedness." More than a hundred years have since elapsed, and the saplings of a century ago have expanded into the dignity of full-grown treehood. The hanging wood, composed chiefly of very noble beeches, with a sprinkling of graceful birches on its nether skirt, raises its crest so high as fully to double the height of the eminence which it crowns; while the oaks on the finely varied ground below, of imposing size, and exhibiting in their grouping the hand of the master, compose such a scene as the finest of the landscapes designed by Martin in illustration of Milton's "Paradise Lost." The day was warm, calm, cloudless; the lights and shadows lay clear and transparent on lake and stream, dell and dingle, green swelling

lawn and tall forest tree; and the hanging wood, and the mossy escarpment over which it hangs, were as musical in the bright sunshine, with the murmur of bees, as when, exactly a hundred and two years before, Shenstone was penning his pastoral ballad.

Quitting the hanging wood, I struck athwart the declivity, direct on the uppermost lake in the chain which I have described as lying, like a string of birds' eggs, along the bottom of the valley. I found it of small extent, a pond or lochan, rather than a lake, - darkly colored, its still, black surface partially embroidered by floats of aquatic plants, among which I could detect the broad leaves of the water-lily, though the flowers were gone, and overhung on all sides by careless groups of trees, that here and there dip their branches in the water. In one striking feature of the place we may still detect the skill of the artist. There is a little island in the upper part of the lake, by much too small and too near the shore to have any particular interest as such; or, indeed, viewed from below, to seem an island at all. It is covered by a thick clump of alders of low growth, just tall enough and thick enough to conceal, screen-like, the steep bank of the lake behind. The top of the bank is occupied by several lofty oaks; and as the screen of alders hides the elevation on which they stand, they seem to rise direct from the level of the water to the giant stature of a hundred feet. The giants of the theatre are made by setting one man on the shoulders of another, and then throwing over both a large cloak; - the giant trees here are made by setting them upon the shoulders of a hill, and making the thick island-screen serve the purpose of the concealing mantle.

The second lake in the chain-a gloomier and smaller piece of water than the first, and much hidden in wood - has in its present state no beauty to recommend it: it is just such an