Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/159

Rh mirthful music, which pattered like silver rain against the purple garments of the night; and the widest streets and the market-place of the town were doubly lighted, while the home-stars of all the houses up to the dark hill-tops, looked like so many constellations, grouped like those we everywhere see by night. It was a scene worthy of a great poet's inspiration, and I hope his pen will some day do better justice to it than mine has done.

Dudley Castle needs only a pen like Sir Walter Scott's to make it famous. For full five hundred years it was inhabited by lords and ladies whose lives and characters might have supplied matter, doubtless, for twenty novels, with facts enough for the web of imagination to be fastened to. But it has never figured in romantic literature; so not one in a hundred of the visiters at Kenilworth ever walks about the walls of this grand old structure. As a fighting castle, it hardly had an equal in England for its commanding elevation and massive walls and towers. Then it meant living as well as fighting; and though it never showed such a palace frontage as Kenilworth, its banquet and other halls, and all its rough, gray storeys, must have commanded a view which few castles in the kingdom could surpass. Standing on the great donjon tower, especially at night, and looking off upon the surrounding scenery, even a sober imagination