Windsor Castle

Windsor Castle, described by Edward Thomas; pictured by E. W. Haslehust

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY

CONTENTS
Illustration: The Curfew Tower
Chapter 1. The Neighbourhood
Illustration: Windsor Castle
Illustration: Windsor Castle from Fellows’ Eyot, Eton
Illustration: The Lower Ward, Windsor Castle
Illustration: The Horse-Shoe Cloisters and St. George’s Chapel
Chapter 2. The Story of the Castle
Illustration: The Hundred Steps
Illustration: The Norman Gate
Illustration: The Canons’ Cloisters
Illustration: Anne Boleyn’s Window, Dean’s Cloisters
Illustration: North Terrace and Winchester Tower
Illustration: Nell Gwyn’s House and Henry VIII Gateway
Illustration: Eton College from Windsor
Chapter 3. Windsor Forest and Park
Illustration: Virginia Water

 
Chapter 1. The Neighbourhood

Celebrated places make a strong and often a visual impression upon the mind before they are seen either in reality or in picture. Windsor Castle, especially from the west and at some little distance, is one of those which confirm and even augment, when first seen, the mysterious vision of the imagination. Seen from the flat meadows of Clewer on a moist morning, when thrushes are singing in the elms, Windsor Castle rises up like a cloud in the east, with nothing behind, or on either side of it, but a sky of dull silver, and nothing below but the smoke wreaths of the town gently and separately ascending. It is like a cloud, a huge soft cloud, without motion yet full of change; and it is presently resolved into the predominant Round Tower, and on one side of it the perpendicularly carved St. George’s Chapel and the Curfew Tower, on the other side the cliffy, long front of the State Apartments. Even thus clear, the buildings are as remote as a cloud in a mental atmosphere of time and undefined associations (Continued...)