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A few stunted kalmias and hemlock-spruces have found foothold in the clefts upon the face of the rock, showing a tawny green, that blends prettily with the scars, lichens, and weather-stains of the cliff; all which show under a sunset light richly and changefully as the breast of a dove. But just now there is no glow of sunset; raining still. But as yet it is only coarsely outlined.
Yesterday, after dinner, we went, with the two eldest children, to the Boboli Gardens. . . . . We entered by a gate, nearer to our house than that by the Pitti Palace, and found ourselves almost immediately among embowered walks of box and shrubbery, and little wildernesses of trees, with here and there a seat under an arbor, and a marble statue, gray with ancient weather-stains.
Before closing this historic document, I cannot but advert to certain notions and traditions concerning the venerable pile in question. Old-time edifices are apt to gather odd fancies and superstitions about them, as they do moss and weather-stains; and this is in a neighborhood a little given to old-fashioned notions, and who look upon the Roost as somewhat of a fated mansion.
A very picture-like interior it was, with the afternoon sun pouring through its vine-shaded open lattice, though time and weather-stains were on the ceiling and pale-colored walls, and its scant furniture was cumbrous, worn, and unbeautiful. The farm-house had been the manor once, and was fast falling to pieces. Mr.
Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World.
There were the oldest portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or else shaggily overgrown by creepers.
And if the lines of the writer shall be traced in quaint characters, and be filled with a grave humor, or break out at times into merriment, all this will be no presumption against their wisdom or his goodness. Is the oak less strong and tough because the mosses and weather-stains stick in all manner of grotesque sketches along its bark?
The Manse is a large, square wooden house, to the surface of which even in the dry New England air, so unfriendly to mosses and lichens and weather-stains, and the other elements of a picturesque complexion a hundred and fifty years of exposure have imparted a kind of tone, standing just above the slow-flowing Concord river, and approached by a short avenue of over-arching trees.
Every separate leaf of the climbing and clustering shrubbery was painfully made out; and the wall was reality itself, with the weather-stains, and the moss, and the crumbling lime between the bricks. It is not well to be so perfect in the inanimate, unless the artist can likewise make man and woman as lifelike, and to as great a depth, too, as the Creator does.
It was one hour after midnight, and the prospect around was lovely. The grey old towers of the ruin, partly entire, partly broken, here bearing the rusty weather-stains of ages, and there partially mantled with ivy, stretched along the verge of the dark rock which rose on Mannering's right hand.
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