Being on the Wetheral side, we now took the opportunity of visiting the Church, which no one visiting Corby should omit doing, one of the divinest pieces of statuary, and by one of the very chiefest artists, Nollekins, being there. It is an emblematical memorial of the late Mrs. Howard, and said to be the artist's chef d'œuvre. Near it is another, by Flaxman, of the ordinary ecclesiastical type.
As we waited in the evening sun for the boat to take us back again, our hearts lifted and hushed by the grandeur of art, and thoughts of the vastness of the soul, and the splendours of its achieved and possible realizations, we seemed more fully cognizant than ever of the sweeping scene of beauty that stretched before us. Never shall we forget that sit on the stone by the river. We had been talking of the illustrious dead and noble living, and remembered fragments of thought and song had come home to our open spirits, and as we looked up and down the river and on its galleried sides, crowded with the lofty heads of the noblest trees, and these all flushed into a thousand changing lines by the descending sun, we felt the full intensity of Natures's holy hallowing power—felt that God has wealth for all; that noble heart wealth of gladness in beauty, in Nature, and in art.
Again in the Walks, we followed on by winding paths to the caves on that side, whose surrounding beauty we should almost profane by attempting to describe. But the caves—the matchless masonry of Nature, hollows in the solid perpendicular rock, and opening on the river—how they silence all trivial thought, and make one forget flesh and blood.
