Once there were more castles than churches in the country, to defend it from the Scot; and though these castles now, for the most part, stand solitary monuments of past ages and conditions of things, yet around them still linger the fame of heroic deeds, and the twilight melancholy of once absorbing woes. Besides its many other interesting monuments of antiquity, 'tis not without its aged monasteries and "ivy-mantled towers." It has been truly said the spirit of romance is departing from the land in which we dwell. Our forests are felled where the freebooters of former days flourished--the fish are chased from our lakes by steamboats--the hills of heath, where the deer roved, are enclosed, and ploughed and harrowed over periodically--the green slopes and dusky dells, where nobles chased the roe, and the sunny glades of the forest into which they emerged, with gallant trains and bridles ringing, and their hunting gear glittering in the glorious sunlight of the olden time--all these are gone; and as we wander over the land, we find mostly drains and furrows, stone dykes, and straight fences, where the heather hung its blue bells unseen from year to year, save by the gorcock or the hare, or the myriads of wild bees that circled round the breathing flowers, and, humming within their tiny cells, sought out the sweet treasures which nature had hidden there. Our castles and abbeys are in ruins--our Border-keeps are mouldering to the ground--the battle grounds have been torn up by the plough--our briery glens and leafy shaws, consecrated by immortal song to past loves, have been ruthlessly desecrated--our ancient sports are at an end--we are a changed people--and the olden time is truly gone. Let it never be thought that we rejoice not in the present because we regret the past. We feel, and are thankful for the blessings and comforts which the improved arts of the age impart to us; we exult in the progress of science throughout the land; we can even look with complacency upon a railroad, though it intersect, with its prosaic line, the woodlands where we first felt the poetry of life--though the very hawthorn, beneath which we breathed our vows of eternal fidelity to her who now lies nightly in our bosom, has been rooted up to prepare a path for it. We see all this, and we think of it without regret. Our reason approving, consents to it; yet our imagination answers, "The spirit of romance is departing from us, and we sigh for the olden time." Imagination is a faculty in which we delight, and phrenologists say that men are happy only in the active exercise of their faculties. Therefore it is, that, leaving the practical speculations of the arts and sciences, we have chosen to select a field wherein imagination may fly her boldest flight, and we have allowed our fancy to rove amid scenes of fictitious bliss or woe, or amidst the real sorrows and joys of many an "owre true tale."