About Warwick - Page 2

water, we behold the gray magnificence of Warwick Castle,
uplifting itself among stately trees, and rearing its turrets high above
their loftiest branches. We can scarcely think the scene real, so
completely do those machicolated towers, the long line of battlements,
the massive buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out our indistinct
ideas of the antique time. It might rather seem as if the sleepy river
(being Shakespeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the mirror of his
gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a lordly residence that stood here
many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened, when you observe
that the image in the tranquil water has all the distinctness of the
actual structure. Either might be the reflection of the other. Wherever
Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as
plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so perfect, that the upper
vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of
feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in an enchanted river.

A ruinous and ivy-grown bridge, that projects from the bank a little on
the hither side of the castle, has the effect of making the scene appear
more entirely apart from the every-day world, for it ends abruptly in the
middle of the stream,--so that, if a cavalcade of the knights and ladies
of romance should issue from the old walls, they could never tread on
earthly ground, any more than we, approaching from the side of modern
realism, can overleap the gulf between our domain and theirs. Yet, if we
seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily be done. Crossing the
bridge on which we stand, and passing a little farther on, we come to the
entrance of the castle, abutting on the highway, and hospitably open at
certain hours to all curious pilgrims who choose to disburse half a crown
or so toward the support of the earl's domestics. The sight of that long
series of historic rooms, full of such splendors and rarities as a great
English family necessarily gathers about itself, in its hereditary abode,
and in the lapse of ages, is well worth the money, or ten times as much,
if indeed the value of the spectacle could be reckoned in money's-worth.
But after the attendant has hurried you from end to end of the edifice,
repeating a guide-book by rote, and exorcising each successive hall of
its poetic glamour and witchcraft by the mere tone in which he talks
about it, you will make the doleful discovery that Warwick Castle has
ceased to be a dream. It is better, methinks, to linger on the bridge,
gazing at Caesar's Tower and Guy's Tower in the dim English sunshine
above, and in the placid Avon below, and still keep them as thoughts in
your own mind, than climb to their summits, or touch even a stone of