On our way from the castle we passed by Guy’s Cliff, which is at present the seat of the Hon. C.B.  Percy.  The establishment looked beautifully from the road, as we saw it up a long avenue of trees; it is one of the places travellers generally examine, but as we were bound for Kenilworth we were content to take it on trust.  It is but a short drive from there to Kenilworth.  We got there about the middle of the afternoon.  Kenilworth has been quite as extensive as Warwick, though now entirely gone to ruins.  I believe Oliver Cromwell’s army have the credit of finally dismantling it.  Cromwell seems literally to have left his mark on his generation, for I never saw a ruin in England when I did not hear that he had something to do with it.  Every broken arch and ruined battlement seemed always to find a sufficient account of itself by simply enunciating the word Cromwell.  And when we see how much the Puritans arrayed against themselves all the aesthetic principles of our nature, we can somewhat pardon those who did not look deeper than the surface, for the prejudice with which they regarded the whole movement; a movement, however, of which we, and all which is most precious to us, are the lineal descendants and heirs.

We wandered over the ruins, which are very extensive, and which Scott, with his usual vivacity and accuracy, has restored and repeopled.  We climbed up into Amy Robsart’s chamber; we scrambled into one of the arched windows of what was formerly the great dining hall, where Elizabeth feasted in the midst of her lords and ladies, and where every stone had rung to the sound of merriment and revelry.  The windows are broken out; it is roofless and floorless, waving and rustling with pendent ivy, and vocal with the song of hundreds of little birds.

We wandered from room to room, looking up and seeing in the walls the desolate fireplaces, tier over tier, the places where the beams of the floors had gone into the walls, and still the birds continued their singing every where.

Nothing affected me more than this ceaseless singing and rejoicing of birds in these old gray ruins.  They seemed so perfectly joyous and happy amid the desolations, so airy and fanciful in their bursts of song, so ignorant and careless of the deep meaning of the gray desolation around them, that I could not but be moved.  It was nothing to them how these stately, sculptured walls became lonely and ruinous, and all the weight of a thousand thoughts and questionings which arise to us is never even dreamed by them.  They sow not, neither do they reap, but their heavenly Father feeds them; and so the wilderness and the desolate place is glad in them, and they are glad in the wilderness and desolate place.

It was a beautiful conception, this making of birds.  Shelley calls them “imbodied joys;” and Christ says, that amid the vaster ruins of man’s desolation, ruins more dreadfully suggestive than those of sculptured frieze and architrave, we can yet live a bird’s life of unanxious joy; or, as Martin Luther beautifully paraphrases it, “We can be like a bird, that sits singing on his twig and lets God think for him.”