picturesqueness, you inhale history. Adjoining the house is a beautiful
ruin, part of the walls and windows and bases of the piers of the
magnificent church administered by your predecessor the abbot. These relics
are very desultory, but they are still abundant, and they testify to the
great scale and the stately beauty of the abbey. You may lie upon the grass
at the base of an ivied fragment, measure the girth of the great stumps of
the central columns, half smothered in soft creepers, and think how strange
it is that in this quiet hollow, in the midst of lonely hills, so exquisite
and elaborate a work of art should have arisen. It is but an hour's walk to
another great ruin, which has held together more completely. There the
central tower stands erect to half its altitude, and the round arches and
massive pillars of the nave make a perfect vista on the unencumbered turf.
You get an impression that when Catholic England was in her prime great
abbeys were as thick as milestones. By native amateurs, even now, the
region is called "wild," though to American eyes it seems thoroughly
suburban in its smoothness and finish. There is a noiseless little railway
running through the valley, and there is an ancient little town at the
abbey gates--a town, indeed, with no great din of vehicles, but with goodly
brick houses, with a dozen "publics," with tidy, whitewashed cottages, and
with little girls, as I have said, bobbing courtesies in the street. But
even now, if one had wound one's way into the valley by the railroad, it
would be rather a surprise to find a small ornamental cathedral in a spot
on the whole so natural and pastoral. How impressive then must the
beautiful church have been in the days of its prosperity, when the pilgrim
came down to it from the grassy hillside and its bells made the stillness
sensible! The abbey was in those days a great affair: as my companion said,
it sprawled all over the place. As you walk away from it you think you have
got to the end of its traces, but you encounter them still in the shape of
a rugged outhouse grand with an Early-English arch, or an ancient well
hidden in a kind of sculptured cavern. It is noticeable that even if you