Among representative scenes that are eloquent with this instructive meaning,--scenes easily and pleasurably accessible to the traveller in what Dickens expressively called "the green, English summer weather,"--is the region of Windsor. The chief features of it have often been described; the charm that it exercises can only be suggested. To see Windsor, moreover, is to comprehend as at a glance the old feudal system, and to feel in a profound and special way the pomp of English character and history. More than this: it is to rise to the ennobling serenity that always accompanies broad, retrospective contemplation of the current of human affairs. In this quaint, decorous town--nestled at the base of that mighty and magnificent castle which has been the home of princes for more than five hundred years--the imaginative mind wanders over vast tracts of the past and beholds as in a mirror the pageants of chivalry, the coronations of kings, the strife of sects, the battles of armies, the schemes of statesmen, the decay of transient systems, the growth of a rational civilisation, and the everlasting march of thought. Every prospect of the region intensifies this sentiment of contemplative grandeur. As you look from the castle walls your gaze takes in miles and miles of blooming country, sprinkled over with little hamlets, wherein the utmost stateliness of learning and rank is gracefully commingled with all that is lovely and soothing in rural life. Not far away rise the "antique towers" of Eton-- "Where grateful science still adores Her Henry's holy shade." It was in Windsor Castle that her Henry was born; and there he often held his court; and it is in St. George's chapel that his ashes repose. In the dim distance stands the church of Stoke-Pogis, about which Gray used to wander, "Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade." You recognise now a deeper significance than ever before in the "solemn stillness" of the incomparable Elegy. The luminous twilight mood of that immortal poem--its pensive reverie and solemn passion--is inherent in the scene; and you feel that it was there, and there only, that the genius of its exceptional author--austerely gentle and severely pure, and thus in perfect harmony with its surroundings--could have been moved to that sublime strain of inspiration and eloquence. Near at hand, in the midst of your reverie, the mellow organ sounds from the chapel of St. George, where, under "fretted vault" and over "long-drawn aisle," depend the ghostly, mouldering banners of ancient knights--as still as the bones of the dead-and-gone monarchs that crumble in the crypt below. Illustration: "St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle."