place in the bank. They crossed the stream, passed the Priory
Shrubberies, leapt the gate into the park, and then on and upward,
called by the unseen Ariel's music before them.--Up, into the hills;
past white crumbling chalk-pits, fringed with feathered juniper and
tottering ashes, their floors strewed with knolls of fallen soil and
vegetation, like wooded islets in a sea of milk.--Up, between steep
ridges of tuft crested with black fir-woods and silver beech, and
here and there a huge yew standing out alone, the advanced sentry of
the forest, with its luscious fretwork of green velvet, like a
mountain of Gothic spires and pinnacles, all glittering and steaming
as the sun drank up the dew-drops. The lark sprang upward into
song, and called merrily to the new-opened sunbeams, while the
wreaths and flakes of mist lingered reluctantly about the hollows,
and clung with dewy fingers to every knoll and belt of pine.--Up
into the labyrinthine bosom of the hills,--but who can describe
them? Is not all nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and
transcendental? How much more those mighty downs, with their
enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all
standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the
delicate vastness, of those grand curves and swells, soft as the
outlines of a Greek Venus, as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had
laid herself down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapt in
a thin veil of silvery green.

Up, into a vast amphitheatre of sward, whose walls banked out the
narrow sky above. And here, in the focus of the huge ring, an
object appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot,--a
little chapel, ivy-grown, girded with a few yews, and elders, and
grassy graves. A climbing rose over the porch, and iron railings
round the churchyard, told of human care; and from the graveyard