CHAPTER V. ST. ASAPH, RHUDDLAN, AND THE VICINITY. Far other thoughts, in inexperienced hours, Sotheby. THERE are moods of mind-the result, perhaps, of too deep experience or long travel, such as dictated some of the wildest and most pathetic poetry of Byron-when the beaten tracks of life, society, friendship, and the yet hollower promises of ambition, seem to lose their every charm. The thoughts of the heart revert, with a sigh of regret, to earlier and more genuine affections,-more unembittered pursuits. We sigh to cast off the worldly mask which custom condemns us to wear-to turn from the empty forms and insincerity which direct the grand movements, and perform the lip-service of the day, and to shelter us in the sanctuary of younger and nobler feelings, when we worshipped the divine effusions of genius as holy truth, and dwelt on the beautiful and bright in nature with the love of a child on its smiling mother's face. With this irrepressible love, so early rooted with habits of deep solitary study and contemplation which strongly marked his character and feelings, and with that restlessness which an early unhappy passion and wounded ambition equally produce, the Wanderer turned from the resorts of the great and the gay with a feeling of scorn and satiety, which seemed to render change of scene almost necessary to his being. He had studied life-as it is idly termed -under different aspects, and in all its conditions; he had beheld society in its equally vulgar extremes; he had experienced the strange mutabilities of fortune, and he now wandered solitary amidst scenes over which fancy, ennobling love, and youthful companionship, had cast the spell of their brief but glorious reign. The ruins of the time-dismantled castle of Flint, which threw its broad shadow in the clear moonlight upon the sands, like the reflection of those vanished scenes, assorted well with the traveller's mood, as he resumed his onward path. Within the precincts of those mouldering battlements monarchs had met,—a monarch laid down his crown; they had rung with the storms of battle, and re-echoed with the wildest revelry of feudal victory and pride. A brave people had there surrendered up their ancient freedom at the feet of their last oppressor, little regardful of the blessings which such a conquest had in store for them; and with thoughts strangely speculating on the results of human action, and the great compensatory system of mingled good and evil, the traveller gazed back upon what were once the massive bulwarks of Flint, fast crumbling into dust. He listened to the growing swell of those eternal surges which came sweeping over the sands, when the bulwarks were in their glory, as now they hasten their decay; and the moon shed a fitful light on the bleak prospect and farspreading shores of the Dee, as he pursued the lonely path along the banks towards the ancient Abbey of Basingwerk. Free as the native mountaineer to select his own time and route, without the breath of another's will, he felt the sense of loneliness lost in the strong and far delight' of exploring at pleasure scenes and spots congenial with the prevailing impulses of the hour. It was this feeling which induced him, on reaching his native hills once more,-a sadder but a wiser man,-to throw off all ties and incumbrances of the way, and taking the cross-roads and well-known bye-paths, to resume acquaintance with the immemorial dwellers by the lake and hill-side-friends of the forest, and vale, and glen, with some of whom, humouring their national foible, he often loved to descant 6 |