I WAS born, and passed the first seven years of my life, iemple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said -- for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places? -- These are of my oldest recolles. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot.
There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,
The whi Themmes brode aged back doth ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide,
Till they decayd through pride.
Indeed, it is the most elegant spot iropolis. What a transition for a tryman visiting London for the first time -- the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet-street, by ued avenues, into its magnifit ample squares, its classic green recesses! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden: that goodly pile
Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,
fronting, with massy trast, the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful -office Row (play kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twiham Naiades! a man would give something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times! to the astou of the young urs, my poraries, who, not being able to guess at its redite maery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondeh the fountain of light! How would the dark lieal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an eva cloud -- or the first arrests of sleep!
Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!
What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of unication, pared with the simple altar-like structure, and sile-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost every where vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate iions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its tinua spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not protracted after su, of temperance, and good-hours. It was the primitive clock, the he of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers t by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd "carved it out quaintly in the sun;" and, turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottos more toug than tombstones. It retty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all his poetry was, of a witty delicacy. They will not e in awkwa