The great lion of Stamford is the Burghley House, the palace of the Marquis of Exeter.  It may be called so without exaggeration of its magnificence as a building or of the extent and grandeur of its surroundings.  The edifice itself would cut up into nearly half a dozen “White Houses,” such as we install our American Presidents in at Washington.  Certainly, in any point of view, it is large and splendid enough for the residence of an emperor and his suite.  Its towers, turrets and spires present a picturesque grove of architecture of different ages, and its windows, it is said, equal in number all the days of the year.  It was not open to the public the day I was in Stamford, so I could only walk around it and estimate its interior by its external grandeur.

But there was an outside world of architecture in the park of sublimer features to me than even the great palace itself, with all its ornate and elaborate sculpture.  It was the architecture of the majestic elms and oaks that stood in long ranks and folded their hands, high up in the blue sky, above the finely-gravelled walks that radiated outward in different directions.  They all wore the angles and arches of the Gothic order and the imperial belt of several centuries.  I walked down one long avenue and counted them on either side.  There were not sixty on both; yet their green and graceful roofage reached a full third of a mile.  Not sixty to pillar and turn such an arch as that!  I sat down on a seat at the end to think of it.  There was a morning service going on in this Cathedral of Nature.  The dew-moistened, foliated arches so lofty, so interwebbed with wavy, waky spangles of sky, were all set to the music of the anthem.  “The street musicians of the heavenly city” were singing one of its happiest hymns out of their mellow throats.  The long and lofty orchestra was full of them.  Their twittering treble shook the leaves with its breath, as it filtered down and flooded the temple below.  Beautiful is this building of God!  Beautiful and blessed are these morning singing-birds of His praise!  Amen!

But do not go yet.  No; I will not.  Here is the only book I carry with me on this walk—­a Hebrew Psalter, stowed away in my knapsack.  I will open it here and now, and the first words my eye lights upon shall be a text for a few thoughts on this scene and scenery.  And here they are,—­seemingly not apposite to this line of reflection, yet running parallel to it very closely: 

[HEBREW PHRASE]

The best English that can be given of these words we have in our translation:  “Blessed is he who, passing through the valley of Baca, maketh it a well.”  Why so?  On what ground?  If a man had settled down in that valley for life, there would have been no merit in his making it a well.  It might, in that case, have been an act of lean-hearted selfishness on his part.  Further than this, a man might have done it who could have had the heart to wall it in from the reach of thirsty