Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 2.djvu/293

 THE HOME OF LADY WENTWORTH.

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��THE HOME OF LADY WENTWORTH.

��BY FRED MYRON COLBY.

��I was at Portsmouth, that lovely old city by the sea, which has quite as much of the antique and the romantic about it as any spot in America, St. Augustine and Quebec not excepted. Several days had been spent in looking about the streets and wharves, visiting the grand mansions of the ancient aris- tocracy, the quaint churches, and the graveyards, where under escutchioned monuments the great men and beauti- ful women of colonial days lie quietly sleeping.

One beautiful June morning, when the sun flashed brilliantly on street and highway and river wave, and the air was fragrant with the breath of lilacs and apple blossoms, I took my way on foot along the Little Harbor road, my objective point being the old home- stead of Gov. Wentworth, celebrated in prose as the home of New Hampshire's vice royalty for twenty years, and quite as much more in poetry as the home of the beautiful Lady Wentworth, whose romantic marriage our Longfellow has celebrated in his exquisite verse. The distance is only about two miles from the centre of Portsmouth, and the road is one of the most picturesque in New- England, leading along delightful parks, elegant farm-houses, and well- cultivated fields, through romantic glens and vales, and over beautifully rounded hills, from which charming views are obtained of the adjacent city, the silvery Piscatasqua, and the broad open sea beyond.

It was with a singular emotion that I approached the mansion. Certain po- etical emotions there are which have entered into our imagination in our youth, so as to take firm possession of us and affect us like reality ; and when these phantoms suddenly evoked by the localities where we have seen them in our dreams start up from the depths

��of memory, a distinct echo, so to speak, of our youth and its ideal loves thrills through all our being. For a time we move in an atmosphere of enchantment, of romance, in which vague and shad- owy figures of "ye ancient day" throng about one. More than once that morn- ing I saw the glittering coach drawn by six spanking bays, flashing along the very highway I was traversing, on its panels shining the lion statant, the ar- morial device of the Wentworth s since Sir Reginald buckled on his armor and went forth with the conqueror to win estates in England, and within the car- riage the portly figure of the old gov- ernor, who has been dead under the sod for over a hundred years. I can- not tell o'f all I saw.

I was greeted at last by a huge ram- bling building of nondescript architec- ture, brown, decayed in some places, yet a noble pile withal.

"Baronial and colonial in its style; Gables and dormer windows everywhere, And stacks of chimneys rising high in air."

The site of the grand mansion is a picturesque one, sequestered in a lovely little nook, overlooking the broad bay of the Piscatasqua, with the sea waves rippling at your feet, and the hazy Isles of Shoals, the home of one of our sweet- est singers, a faint line on the horizon. It is built close upon the water, and the luxuriant lawn in the rear needs a strong sea wall to protect it from tidal en- croachments. Vast hedges of lilacs all in bloom, bordered the grounds and even swept up around one end of the old mansion with which they seemed to hold sweet communion. The broad open court was covered with green grass that rippled luxuriantly in the breeze and shook the golden chalices of the buttercups that opened in the sun- shine. The shingled roof was shadowed by noble trees, some of which must

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