least six months in one place before its true character unfolds: the broad
beauties you see at once, but it needs the microscope of habit to find out
the rarest charms. Therefore it is much easier to descant on the tangible,
striking beauty of Valle Crucis Abbey than on the aggregate loveliness of
Llangollen Vale; and perhaps it is this lack of familiarity that leads
novelists, poets and others to dwell so much more and with such detail on
buildings than on natural scenery. It may not be given them to understand
upon how much higher a plane of beauty stands a bed of ferns on a rocky
ledge, a clump of trees even on a flat meadow, and especially a tangled
forest-scene or a view of distant mountains in a sunset glow, or the
surface of water undotted by a sail, than the highest effect of man-made
beauty, be it even York Minster or the Parthenon. What man does has value
by reason of the meaning in it, and of course man cannot but fall short of
the perfection of his own meaning; whereas Nature is of herself perfection,
and perfection in which there is no effort. Valle Crucis is hardly a rival
of Fountains or Rivaulx. The Cistercians in the beginning of their
foundation were reformers, ascetic, and essentially agriculturists. Their
great leader, Bernard of Clairvaux, the advocate of silence and work, once
said, "Believe me, I have learnt more from trees than ever I learnt from
men." But decay came even into this community of farmer-monks, and the
praise and panegyric of the abbey, as handed down to us by a Welsh poet,
betray unconsciously things hardly to the credit of a monastic house, for
the abbot, "the pope of the glen," he tells us, gave entertainments "like
the leaves in summer," with "vocal and instrumental music," wine, ale and
curious dishes of fish and fowl, "like a carnival feast," and "a thousand
apples for dessert."

[Illustration: OWEN GLENDOWER'S PRISON.]

[Illustration: THE PARLIAMENT HOUSE, DOLGELLY.]