Page:The Romance of Nature; or, The Flower-Seasons Illustrated.djvu/247

149 Turned to flowers, still in some

Colours goe and colours come.

We must quit the garden's trim walks and flower-beds, if we would seek our next fair subject in its favourite haunts; for the fragrant and beautiful, the Cheiranthus Cheiri of botanists, loves to dwell amid the relics of past magnificence, to hide the dismantled ruins with its robe of green and gold, and to crown with its wealth of blossoms the mouldering walls and towers of our old abbeys and castles, where

I have myself gathered its exquisitely perfumed flowers on the Elizabethan Kenilworth; aye, even in her Majesty's chamber, and from the far-famed and peerless banquet-hall (once decked with other fabrics than the interlacing stems of ivy and wild flowers); I have found it blooming on the crumbling battlements of Conway Castle; springing from crannies in the proud and royal Eagle Tower of Caernarvon—and many another departing monument of royal and feudal magnificence and might in Cambria's mountain-realm; at Ludlow, the noble Castle Hall, where Milton's Masque of Comus was first represented, is richly adorned with the starry golden flowers. Goodrich and Magland equally share its bright smiles illumining their dim recesses, and crowning either ancient Keep with annual garlands; at Chepstow, it enwreaths the dim prison-house of Henry Marten; at Tintern,—that relic of surpassing beauty,—the Wall-flowers