glides by bower and hall, through magic forests and by witching eaves in
the world of poet-books. And Darrell listened, and the flute-notes
mingled with the atmosphere faint and far off, like voices from that
world itself.

Out then they came, this broad waste land before them; and Lionel said
merrily,--

"But this is the very scene! Here the young knight, leaving his father's
hall, would have checked his destrier, glancing wistfully now over that
green wild which seems so boundless, now to the 'umbrageous horror' of
those breathless woodlands, and questioned himself which way to take for
adventure."

"Yes," said Darrell, coming out from his long reserve on all that
concerned his past life,--"Yes, and the gold of the gorse-blossoms
tempted me; and I took the waste land." He paused a moment, and renewed:
"And then, when I had known cities and men, and snatched romance from
dull matter-of-fact, then I would have done as civilization does with
romance itself,--I would have enclosed the waste land for my own
aggrandizement. Look," he continued, with a sweep of the hand round the
width of prospect, "all that you see to the verge of the horizon, some
fourteen years ago, was to have been thrown into the pretty paddock we
have just quitted, and serve as park round the house I was then building.
Vanity of human wishes! What but the several proportions of their common
folly distinguishes the baffled squire from the arrested conqueror?
Man's characteristic cerebral organ must certainly be acquisitiveness."

"Was it his organ of acquisitiveness that moved Themistocles to boast
that 'he could make a small state great'?" "Well remembered,--