We passed along by the castle wall, and noticed the escutcheon of the
Cliffords or the Thanets carved in stone over the portal, with the motto
Desormais, the application of which I do not well see; these ancestral
devices usually referring more to the past, than to the future. There is
a large old church, just at the extremity of the village, and just below
the castle, on the slope of the hill. The gray wall of the castle
extends along the road a considerable distance, in good repair, with here
and there a buttress, and the semicircular bulge of a tower.
The scenery along the road was not particularly striking,--long slopes,
descending from ridges; a generally hard outline of country, with not
many trees, and those, as yet, destitute of foliage. It needs to be
softened with a good deal of wood. There were stone farm-houses, looking
ancient, and able to last till twice as old. Instead of the hedges, so
universal in other parts of England, there were stone fences of good
height and painful construction, made of small stones, which I suppose
have been picked up out of the fields through hundreds of years. They
reminded me of old Massachusetts, though very unlike our rude stone
walls, which, nevertheless, last longer than anything else we build.
Another New England feature was the little brooks, which here and there
flowed across our road, rippling over the pebbles, clear and bright. I
fancied, too, an intelligence and keenness in some of the Yorkshire
physiognomies, akin to those characteristics in my countrymen's faces.
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