present a stump just high enough to form a seat; and others are perhaps a man’s height from the ground; and all are mossy, and with grass and weeds rooted into their chinks, and here and there a tuft of flowers giving its tender little beauty to their decay.  The material of the edifice is a soft red stone, and it is now extensively overgrown with a lichen of a very light gray hue, which at a little distance makes the walls look as if they had long ago been whitewashed and now had partially returned to their original color.  The arches of the nave and transept were noble and immense; there were four of them together, supporting a tower which has long since disappeared,—­arches loftier than I ever conceived to have been made by man.  Very possibly, in some cathedral that I have seen, or am yet to see, there may be arches as stately as these, but I doubt whether they can ever show to such advantage in a perfect edifice as they do in this ruin,—­most of them broken, only one, as far as I recollect, still completing its sweep.  In this state they suggest a greater majesty and beauty than any finished human work can show; the crumbling traces of the half-obliterated design producing somewhat of the effect of the first idea of any thing admirable, when it dawns upon the mind of an artist or a poet,—­an idea which, do what he may, he is sure to fall short of in his attempt to embody it....

Conceive all these shattered walls, with here and there an arched door, or the great arched vacancy of a window; these broken stones and monuments scattered about; these rows of pillars up and down the nave, these arches, through which a giant might have stepped, and not needed to bow his head, unless in reverence to the sanctity of the place,—­conceive it all, with such verdure and embroidery of flowers as the gentle, kindly moisture of the English climate procreates on all old things, making them more beautiful than new, conceive it with the grass for sole pavement of the long and spacious aisle, and the sky above for the only roof.  The sky, to be sure, is more majestic than the tallest of those arches; and yet these latter, perhaps, make the stronger impression of sublimity, because they translate the sweep of the sky to our finite comprehension.  It was a most beautiful, warm, sunny day, and the ruins had all the pictorial advantage of bright light, and deep shadows.  I must not forget that birds flew in and out among the recesses, and chirped and warbled, and made themselves at home there.  Doubtless, the birds of the present generation are the posterity of those who first settled in the ruins, after the Reformation; and perhaps the old monks of a still earlier day may have watched them building about the abbey, before it was a ruin at all.

* * * * *

From the “American Note Books.”

=_301._= SCENERY OF THE MERRIMAC.