The cyclopædias and the guide-books dilate, with much particularity and characteristic eloquence, upon Warwick Castle and other great features of Warwickshire, but the attribute that all such records omit is the atmosphere; and this, perhaps, is rather to be indicated than described. The prevailing quality of it is a certain high and sweet solemnity--a feeling kindred with the placid, happy melancholy that steals over the mind, when, on a sombre afternoon in autumn, you stand in the churchyard, and listen, amid rustling branches and sighing grass, to the low music of distant organ and chanting choir. Peace, haunted by romance, dwells here, in reverie. The great tower of Warwick, based in silver Avon and pictured in its slumbering waters, seems musing upon the centuries over which it has watched, and full of unspeakable knowledge and thought. The dark and massive gateways of the town and the timber-crossed fronts of its antique houses live on in the same strange dream and perfect repose; and all along the drive to Kenilworth are equal images of rest--of a rest in which there is nothing supine or sluggish, no element of death or decay, but in which passion, imagination, beauty, and sorrow, seized at their topmost poise, seem crystallised in eternal calm. What opulence of splendid life is vital for ever in Kenilworth's crumbling ruin there are no words to say. What pomp of royal banners! what dignity of radiant cavaliers! what loveliness of stately and exquisite ladies! what magnificence of banquets! what wealth of pageantry! what lustre of illumination! The same festal music that the poet Gascoigne heard there, three hundred years ago, is still sounding on, to-day. The proud and cruel Leicester still walks in his vaulted hall. The imperious face of the Virgin Queen still from her dais looks down on plumed courtiers and jewelled dames; and still the moonlight, streaming through the turret-window, falls on the white bosom and the great, startled, black eyes of Amy Robsart, waiting for her lover. The gaze of the pilgrim, indeed, rests only upon old, gray, broken walls, overgrown with green moss and ivy, and pierced by irregular casements through which the sun shines, and the winds blow, and the rains drive, and the birds fly, amid utter desolation. But silence and ruin are here alike eloquent and awful; and, much as the place impresses you by what remains, it impresses you far more by what has vanished. Ambition, love, pleasure, power, misery, tragedy--these are gone; and being gone they are immortal. I plucked, in the garden of Kenilworth, one of the most brilliant red roses that ever grew; and as I pressed it to my lips I seemed to touch the lips of that superb, bewildering beauty who outweighed England's crown (at least in story), and whose spirit is the everlasting genius of the place.