The truth of this description startled us, and revealed instantly how deeply impressed upon the mind of her youthful lover must have been that face which was the starlight of his boyhood.  Tears had passed since they parted, and chasms of time and gulfs yet deeper and wider than time ever knows had separated Byron from Annesley and England, and yet, when he wrote those lines, her face rose before him so clearly, wearing on its loveliness the impress of care and sorrow which he knew must be there, that no words but his can truly describe the expression of her features.  Turning to our conductress, we asked if she had ever seen the Lady of Annesley.  “Yes, I knew and loved her well, for I was her maid many years”; and, with a faltering tone, she added, “she died in my arms.”  Genius has immortalized Mary Chaworth; yet the tender and heartfelt tribute of one who had been the humble, but daily witness of the beauty of her life, was worth a thousand homilies.

We were conducted through the library, which had been in other days the drawing-room, out of which opens a small apartment, known to the readers of the “Dream” as the “antique oratory.”  Leading from the old entrance-hall is the favorite sitting-room of Mary Chaworth in her happy childhood and youth; and here, in his boyish days, Byron often sat beside her while she played for him his favorite airs on the piano-forte.  Beneath the window is a little garden, where she cultivated the flowers she loved best, and which are still cherished for her memory.  Our guide gathered a few of these, and gave them to our young companion:  they now lie before us, carefully preserved, with some of their gay tints yet unfaded,—­memorials, not only of Mary Chaworth, who lived and loved and suffered through all the varied experience of woman’s life, but also of her to whom the blossoms were given, the fair, young girl, “who lived long enough on earth to learn its better lessons, but passed from it upwards and onwards without a knowledge of sin except the shadow it casts on the world.”

Taking leave of our kind guide, to whom we were indebted for a visit of deep interest, we paused a moment on the terrace ere we “passed the massy gate of that old hall,” to receive once more into our memory

     “the old mansion and the accustomed hall
  And the remembered chambers, and the place,
  The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade.”

A holy stillness pervaded the venerable house and its surrounding scenery, a peace which breathed of a purer sphere, where what is best on earth finds its correspondence.

We wondered not, that, when the deep waters of the poet’s soul, too often ruffled by passion, polluted by vice, or made turbid by selfishness, were calm and pure enough to mirror heaven, they ever reflected the bright and morning star of Annesley.

The transition from Annesley Hall to Newstead Abbey is inevitable in thought and rapid in fact,—­the road, over which the young poet so often passed, between the two estates, being only three miles in length.  We had lingered so long at Annesley that the day was nearly spent before we reached the Abbey.  How did the venerable pile, with its mysterious memories, fateful histories, and poetical associations, flash out into light and darken into shadow as the October sun sank behind the distant hills!