He lived,
however, to be nearly ninety, and died in the Wakes at last, in the
very room, and if I mistake not, the very spot in the room, where his
idol had passed away in 1793.
As long as Professor Bell was alive the house preserved, in all
essentials, the identical character which it had maintained under its
famous tenant. Overgrown with creepers to the very chimneys, divided
by the greenest and most velvety of lawns from a many-coloured furnace
of flower-beds, scarcely parted by lush paddocks from the intense
green wall of the coppiced hill, the Wakes has always retained for my
memory an impression of rural fecundity and summer glow absolutely
unequalled. The garden seemed to burn like a green sun, with crimson
stars and orange meteors to relieve it. All, I believe, has since
then been altered. Selborne, they tell me, has ceased to bear any
resemblance to that rich nest in which Thomas Bell so piously guarded
the idea of Gilbert White. If it be so, we must live content with
_The memory of what has been,
And never more may be_.
THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE
EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE. _Ipswich: Printed
and sold by John Raw; sold also by Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme,
Paternoster Row, London_.
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