If you entered his house it gave you as cheerless a feeling as its owner.  There was the conservatory, so splendid with rich plants and flowers in his mothers time—­now a dusty receptacle of hampers, broken hand-glasses, and garden tools.  These tools could never be used, for the gardens were grown wild.  Tall grass grew in the walks, and the huge unpruned shrubs disputed the passage with you.  In the wood above the gardens, reached by several flights of fine, but now moss-grown, steps, there stood a pavilion, once clearly very beautiful.  It was now damp and ruinous-its walls covered with greenness and crawling insects.  It was a great lurking-place of Sir Roger when on the watch for poachers.

The line of the Rockvilles was evidently running fast out.  It had reached the extremity of imbecility and contempt—­it must soon reach its close.

Sir Roger used to make his regular annual visit to town; but of late, when there, he had wandered restlessly about the streets, peeping into the shop-windows; and if it rained, standing under entries for hours after, till it was gone over.  The habit of lurking and peering about was upon him; and his feet bore him instinctively into those narrow and crowded alleys where swarm the poachers of the city—­the trespassers and anglers in the game preserves and streams of humanity.  He had lost all pleasure in his club; the most exciting themes of political life retained no piquancy for him.  His old friends ceased to find any pleasure in him.  He was become the driest of all dry wells.  Poachers, and anglers, and Methodists, haunted the wretched purlieus of his fast fading-out mind, and he resolved to go to town no more.  His whole nature was centered in his woods.  He was forever on the watch; and when at Rockville again, if he heard a door clap when in bed, he thought it a gun in his woods, and started up, and was out with his keepers.

Of what value was that magnificent estate to him?—­those superb woods; those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and riant river coming traveling on, and taking a noble sweep below his windows—­that glorious expanse of neat verdant meadows, stretching almost to Stockington, and enlivened by numerous herds of the most beautiful cattle—­those old farms and shady lanes overhung with hazel and wild rose; the glittering brook, and the songs of woodland birds—­what were they to that worn-out old man, that victim of the delusive doctrine of blood, of the man-trap of an hereditary name?

There the poet could come, and feel the presence of divinity in that noble scene, and hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create new heavens and earths from the glorious chaos of nature around him, and in one short hour live an empyrean of celestial life and love.  There could come the very humblest children of the plebeian town, and feel a throb of exquisite delight pervade their bosoms at the sight of the very flowers on the sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above