As Linden approached the house, he was struck with the melancholy air
of desolation which spread over and around it: fragments of stone,
above which clomb the rank weed, insolently proclaiming the triumph of
Nature's meanest offspring over the wrecks of art; a moat dried up; a
railing once of massive gilding, intended to fence a lofty terrace on
the right from the incursions of the deer, but which, shattered and
decayed, now seemed to ask with the satirist,--

"To what end did our lavish ancestors
Erect of old these stately piles of ours?"

--a chapel on the left, perfectly in ruins,--all appeared strikingly
to denote that time had outstripped fortune, and that the years, which
alike hallow and destroy, had broken the consequence, in deepening the
antiquity, of the House of Mordaunt.

The building itself agreed but too well with the tokens of decay
around it; most of the windows were shut up, and the shutters of dark
oak, richly gilt, contrasted forcibly with the shattered panes and
mouldered framing of the glass. It was a house of irregular
architecture. Originally built in the fifteenth century, it had
received its last improvement, with the most lavish expense, during
the reign of Anne; and it united the Gallic magnificence of the latter
period with the strength and grandeur of the former; it was in a great
part overgrown with ivy, and, where that insidious ornament had not
reached, the signs of decay, and even ruin, were fully visible. The
sun itself, bright and cheering as it shone over Nature, making the
green sod glow like emeralds, and the rivulet flash in its beam, like
one of those streams of real light, imagined by Swedenborg in his