We approach the venerable enclosure. It is a vast circular enbankment some twenty feet high, with here and there bushes and small trees. The general symmetry suggests the work of human hands, but the abandoned appearance tells of antiquity. Our road leads down over a depression, the old moat,--and then up again, and in through an opening, on both sides of which is ragged masonry of flint, cobble-stones, and white mortar. We now discover that the huge mound is a mortar-wall, overgrown with grass on both sides, this opening having been rudely broken through it. Walls, a thousand and more years old! What desolation; what strange fascination! We enter and go up to the top of the embankment. What tongue or pen can adequately describe the emotions awakened? The views in all directions are charming. No mountains are visible to inspire awe; no great metropolis is to be seen; but "sweet fields of living green" hills innumerable, pleasant groves, feeding sheep, tinkling cow-bells, and air sweet with wild flowers and modest daisies (crushed at every tread beneath the feet) are about us; but we leave these, to study the grand old ruin. At the centre is a hollowed, though comparatively level space, of five hundred feet in diameter, covered with grass, bushes, and small mounds. The depression is not far from twenty feet deep, the earth and grass sloping up to the walk, about ten feet wide, which encircles it. The outer edge is irregularly hemmed in by bushes. Outside of this is a mote fifty feet wide, and thirty feet deep. Encircling all is a plateau two hundred feet wide, and another mote, thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep. The motes were once filled with water, but now grass has superseded it. Instead of being a barrier against approaching foes, they have better uses. In the language of Whittier, applied to an old New England burial-ground:-- There sheep that graze the neighboring plain Like white ghosts come and go; The farm horse drags his fetlock chain, The cow-bell tinkles slow. With variation of tense another verse of the same poem applies to it:-- It knows the glow of eventide, The sunrise and the noon, And sanctified and glorified It sleeps beneath the moon. The time has come to leave, and we return to our team. Old Sarum has been seen, and is never to be forgotten. Where are they who here thought and labored a thousand years ago? Gone, without a solitary exception, gone to the silent mansions of the dead. AMESBURY.