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Book, page 111 / 131 forays throughout the week, yet keep about the venerable edifice on Sundays, as if they had inherited a reverence for the day, from their ancient confreres, the monks. Indeed, a believer in the metempsychosis might easily imagine these Gothic-looking birds to be the embodied souls of the ancient friars still hovering about their sanctified abode. I dislike to disturb any point of popular and poetic faith, and was loath, therefore, to question the authenticity of this mysterious reverence for the Sabbath on the part of the Newstead rooks; but certainly in the course of my sojourn in the Rook Cell, I detected them in a flagrant outbreak and foray on a bright Sunday morning. Beside the occasional clamor of the rookery, this remote apartment was often greeted with sounds of a different kind, from the neighboring ruins. The great lancet window in front of the chapel, adjoins the very wall of the chamber; and the mysterious sounds from it at night have been well described by Lord Byron: ----"Now loud, now frantic, The gale sweeps through its fretwork, and oft sings The owl his anthem, when the silent quire Lie with their hallelujahs quenched like fire. "But on the noontide of the moon, and when The wind is winged from one point of heaven, There moans a strange unearthly sound, which then Is musical-a dying accent driven Through the huge arch, which soars and sinks again. Some deem it but the distant echo given Back to the night wind by the waterfall, And harmonized by the old choral wall. "Others, that some original shape or form, Shaped by decay perchance, hath given the power To this gray ruin, with a voice to charm. Sad, but serene, it sweeps o'er tree or tower; The cause I know not, nor can solve; but such The fact:--I've heard it,--once perhaps too much."
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