Yes, 'tis
a blessing here to breathe and muse. And cold his clay, indeed, who does
not yield to thy Ausonian beauty! Clime where the heart softens and the
mind expands! Region of mellowed bliss! O most enchanting land!
But we are at the park gates.
They whirled along through a park which would have contained half a
hundred of those Patagonian paddocks of modern times which have usurped
the name. At length the young Duke was roused from his reverie
by Carlstein, proud of his previous knowledge, leaning over and
announcing--
'Chateau de Dacre, your Grace!'
The Duke looked up. The sun, which had already set, had tinged with a
dying crimson the eastern sky, against which rose a princely edifice.
Castle Dacre was the erection of Vanbrugh, an imaginative artist,
whose critics we wish no bitterer fate than not to live in his splendid
creations. A spacious centre, richly ornamented, though broken, perhaps,
into rather too much detail, was joined to wings of a corresponding
magnificence by fanciful colonnades. A terrace, extending the whole
front, was covered with orange trees, and many a statue, and many an
obelisk, and many a temple, and many a fountain, were tinted with
the warm twilight.
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