From Coventry to Kenilworth, of course. It was late in the afternoon when I started the rooks in those old ruins, and sat down to watch their flight about its ivied towers. Here was, indeed, a place for thought, and for sentimentalism. How the romance of Scott, that once so bewitched me, (as I read it, stretched in boyish luxury upon the floor of the verandah of an American villa, on the dear banks of the Hudson,) now rose about me in a strange dream of reality; and how tormenting the endeavour to separate the true history from the charming fable! Here the finely wrought Gothic masonry, and delicate mouldings, and deeply recessed windows of the great banqueting-room, stand without a roof; and the ivy that climbs the solid walls, and twists among the shattered mullions and transoms, is rooted inside of the once hospitable hall, and beneath the very point in space, where once the haughty Queen Elizabeth sat in state, on a splendid dais, with Burleigh, and Leicester, and Raleigh around her, while these cold, damp walls lifted about them their magnificent tapestries, and gorgeous blazonries of heraldic honour. In that bay window she once reclined, to look over the park, and to think thoughts too deep for utterance. The rich architectural work of these chambers betrays their former splendid uses; and one grudges, to the great serpent-like convolutions of the ivy-vines, the sole proprietorship of their surviving graces. Yet there they hang their melancholy leaves; and the beautiful desolation is possibly rich enough in its moral effect on the heart of the visitor, to make one contented on the whole, that the pile was once so great in design, and so exquisite in detail, and that the ruin is now so complete. Poor Amy Robsart!