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Withal, our Old Nobility in its pleasaunces was treading once more the old graceful measure which the War arrested; Bohemia had resumed its motley; even the middle class was capering, very noticeably... To gad about smiling as though he were quite well, thank you, or to sit down, pull a long face, and make his soul, which, I wondered, is the better procedure for a man knowing that very soon he will have to undergo a vital operation at the hands of a wholly unqualified surgeon who dislikes him personally?

And without another spoken word she moved away, and left me in the green pleasaunces of the garden, with my heart riven this way and that, scarce knowing what I did or where I stood. Black, blank, chill, confining night shut us in as Leopold Dessauer and I rode out of Plassenburg. Our horses had been made ready for us at the little water-gate in the lower garden.

Frequently in these letters an allusion will puzzle the reader who does not know of Rossetti’s love of nocturnal rambling, an allusion, however, which those who knew him will fully understand. Here is a sentence of the kind:— “As I haven’t been outside my door for months in the daytime, I should not have had much opportunity of enjoying pastime and pleasaunces.”

Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, set apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the Old World, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some state-sick ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to the solitude of sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace windows upon the leisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst beauty vainly created for the perpetual festival of their empty lives.

Nearly all the houses had vegetable gardens, and some of them had flower-gardens that appeared princelier pleasaunces to my boy than he has ever seen since in Europe or America.

Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid god-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies hidden in elaborate gardens, all bedizened with fashionable architecture: regular palaces, pleasaunces, with uncomfortable edifices, artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous plants, parrots, apes, giraffes; childish splendours of gardening and engineering and menageries, which we meet already in "Ogier the Dane" and "Huon of Bordeaux," and which later poets epitomized out of the endless descriptions of Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," the still more frightful inventories of the Amadis romances.

Lothair, who was very sensible to the charms of Nature, found at first relief in the beauties of Muriel. The season was propitious to the scene. August is a rich and leafy month, and the glades and avenues and stately trees of his parks and pleasaunces seemed, at the same time, to soothe and gladden his perturbed spirit.

Rome without her fountains would not be Rome; every memory of her includes them. In the streets, in the piazzas, in the wide pleasaunces and gardens, the fountains allure us onward, and comfort us for our weariness.

Its spacious curtilage and dark pleasaunces covered all the ground between the river and the Rue St. Antoine; and north of this, under the shadow of the eight great towers of the Bastille, which looked, four outward to check the stranger, four inward to bridle the town, a second palace, beginning where St. Pol ended, carried the realm of decay to the city wall.

So Cary, against his will, sat and sang another song; and in the meanwhile the party had broken up, and wandered away by twos and threes, among trim gardens and pleasaunces, and clipped yew-walks Where west-winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells "