habitation where only servants live to put cases on the furniture
and open the windows. I enter as I would into the tomb of the
Capulets, to look at the family pictures that here frown in armour,
or smile in ermine. The mildew respects not the lordly robe, and
the worm riots unchecked on the cheek of beauty.

There was nothing in the architecture of the building, or the form
of the furniture, to detain me from the avenue where the aged pines
stretched along majestically. Time had given a greyish cast to
their ever-green foliage; and they stood, like sires of the forest,
sheltered on all sides by a rising progeny. I had not ever seen so
many oaks together in Norway as in these woods, nor such large
aspens as here were agitated by the breeze, rendering the wind
audible--nay musical; for melody seemed on the wing around me. How
different was the fresh odour that reanimated me in the avenue, from
the damp chillness of the apartments; and as little did the gloomy
thoughtfulness excited by the dusty hangings, and worm-eaten
pictures, resemble the reveries inspired by the soothing melancholy
of their shade. In the winter, these august pines, towering above
the snow, must relieve the eye beyond measure and give life to the
white waste.

The continual recurrence of pine and fir groves in the day sometimes
wearies the sight, but in the evening, nothing can be more
picturesque, or, more properly speaking, better calculated to
produce poetical images. Passing through them, I have been struck
with a mystic kind of reverence, and I did, as it were, homage to
their venerable shadows. Not nymphs, but philosophers, seemed to
inhabit them--ever musing; I could scarcely conceive that they were
without some consciousness of existence--without a calm enjoyment of