Blanche Delaware smiled, and her father spoke, perhaps, the feelings of both. "We have found you out, Mr. Burrel," he said, "and understand your turn for satirizing yourself."
"I am not doing so now, I can assure you," replied Burrel. "What I state is exactly the fact. I sat down to read Wordsworth's works with a determination to dislike them, and I succeeded in one or two poems, which have been cried up to the skies; but, as I went on, I found so often a majestic spirit of poetical philosophy, clothing itself in the full sublime of simplicity, that I felt reproved and abashed, and I read again with a better design. In doing so, though I still felt that there was much amidst all the splendor that I could neither like nor admire, yet I perceived how and why others might and would find great beauties and infinite sweetness in that which palled upon my taste; and I perceived also, that the fault lay in me far more than in the poetry. The beauties I felt more than ever; and some of the smaller pieces, I am convinced, will live for ages, with the works of Shakspeare and Milton."
"They will, indeed," said Sir Sidney Delaware, "as long as there is a taste in man. Nevertheless, the poet--who is, perhaps, as great a philosopher, too, as ever lived--has sacrificed, like many philosophers, an immense gift of genius to a false hypothesis in regard to his art, and has, consequently, systematically poured forth more trash than perhaps any man living. His poems, collected, always put me in mind of an account I have somewhere read of the diamond mines of Golconda, where inestimable jewels are found mingled with masses of soft mud. But you have long done breakfast, Mr. Burrel. Come, Blanche, I am going to take Mr. Burrel to the terrace, and descant most dully on all the antiquities of the house. Let us have your company, my love; for we shall meet with so many old things, it may be as well to have something young to relieve them!"
It required but a short space of time to array Blanche Delaware for the walk round the terrace that her father proposed. In less than a minute she came down in the same identical cottage bonnet--the ugliest of all things--in which Burrel had first beheld her when with her brother; but, strange to say, although on that occasion he had only thought her a pretty country girl, so changed were now all his feelings--so many beauties had he marked which then lay hid, that, as she descended with a smiling and happy face to join them at the door of the hall, he thought her the loveliest creature that he had ever beheld in any climate, or at any time.
