The rustic beauty of the hamlet has been copiously eulogized by
antiquarians and provincial historians. The beautiful foliage of its
trees, varying in colour, appears like fleecy clouds of verdure, rising
one above the other, over which a still deeper shadow is cast by the
towering woods on each side of the valley; and in the midst of this
fairy region, as if conscious of its proud pre-eminence, rises the
sacred edifice, clothed in mourning of nature's deepest shade:[5]

Oh! many an hour of ecstasy
I past within its fading towers;
When life, and love, and poesy,
Hung on my harp their sweetest flowers.

To indulge a little in reverie--"how are the mighty fallen!"--Here was
once worshipped the virgin amidst the glittering pomp of monkish
solemnity; when burst the beams of morning through the tracery of yon
mighty window--

"Shorn of its glass of thousand colourings,"

and threw the glowing emblazonry of the tinted pane upon the Mosaic
pavement of the choir; while the loud and slowly-pealing matin
reverberated through the sumptuous church. Here was interred with
ceremony of waxen taper and mid-night requiem, the noble founder of this
dilapidated fane, Sir Walter L'Espec, beneath that wreck of pillar and
architrave and those carved remains of the chisel's achievement--he who
deemed that the sepulchre

"Should canopy his bones till doomsday;
But all things have their end."