But what more especially attracts his notice, are those peculiarities
which distinguish an old country and an old state of society from a
new one. I have never yet grown familiar enough with the crumbling
monuments of past ages, to blunt the intense interest with which I at
first beheld them. Accustomed always to scenes where history was, in a
manner, in anticipation; where every thing in art was new and
progressive, and pointed to the future rather than to the past; where,
in short, the works of man gave no ideas but those of young existence,
and prospective improvement; there was something inexpressibly
touching in the sight of enormous piles of architecture, gray with
antiquity, and sinking into-decay. I cannot describe the mute but
deep-felt enthusiasm with which I have contemplated a vast monastic
ruin, like Tintern Abbey, buried in the bosom of a quiet valley, and
shut up from the world, as though it had existed merely for itself; or
a warrior pile, like Conway Castle, standing in stern loneliness on
its rocky height, a mere hollow yet threatening phantom of departed
power. They spread a grand, and melancholy, and, to me, an unusual
charm over the landscape; I, for the first time, beheld signs of
national old age, and empire's decay, and proofs of the transient and
perishing glories of art, amidst the ever-springing and reviving
fertility of nature.

But, in fact, to me every thing was full of matter; the footsteps of
history were every where to be traced; and poetry had breathed over
and sanctified the land. I experienced the delightful freshness of
feeling of a child, to whom every thing is new. I pictured to myself a
set of inhabitants and a mode of life for every habitation that I saw,
from the aristocratical mansion, amidst the lordly repose of stately
groves and solitary parts, to the straw-thatched cottage, with its
scanty garden and its cherished woodbine. I thought I never could be