This great park is fourteen miles in circumference and contains nearly four thousand acres, and many of the youngest trees that adorn it are more than one hundred and fifty years old. Far in its heart you stroll by Virginia Water--an artificial lake, but faultless in its gentle beauty--and perceive it so deep and so breezy that a full-rigged ship-of-war, with armament, can navigate its wind-swept, curling billows. This lake was made by that sanguinary Duke of Cumberland who led the English forces at Culloden. In the dim groves that fringe its margin are many nests wherein pheasants are bred, to fall by the royal shot and to supply the royal table: those you may contemplate but not approach. At a point in your walk, sequestered and lonely, they have set up and skilfully disposed the fragments of a genuine ruined temple, brought from the remote East--relic perchance of "Tadmor's marble waste," and certainly a most solemn memorial of the morning twilight of time. Broken arch, storm-stained pillar, and shattered column are here shrouded with moss and ivy; and should you chance to see them as the evening shadows deepen and the evening wind sighs mournfully in the grass your fancy will not fail to drink in the perfect illusion that one of the stateliest structures of antiquity has slowly crumbled where now its fragments remain. "Quaint" is a descriptive epithet that has been much abused, but it may, with absolute propriety, be applied to Windsor. The devious little streets there visible, and the carved and timber-crossed buildings, often of great age, are uncommonly rich in the expressiveness of imaginative character. The emotions and the fancy, equally with the sense of necessity and the instinct of use, have exercised their influence and uttered their spirit in the shaping and adornment of the town. While it constantly feeds the eye--with that pleasing irregularity of lines and forms which is so delicious and refreshing--it quite as constantly nurtures the sense of romance that ought to play so large a part in our lives, redeeming us from the tyranny of the commonplace and intensifying all the high feelings and noble aspirations that are possible to human nature. England contains many places like Windsor; some that blend in even richer amplitude the elements of quaintness, loveliness, and magnificence. The meaning of them all is the same: that romance, beauty, and gentleness are forever vital; that their forces are within our souls, and ready and eager to find their way into our thoughts, actions, and circumstances, and to brighten for every one of us the face of every day; that they ought neither to be relegated to the distant and the past nor kept for our books and day-dreams alone; but--in a calmer and higher mood than is usual in this age of universal mediocrity, critical scepticism, and miscellaneous tumult--should be permitted to flow forth into our architecture, adornments, and customs,