on that memorable morning.  But our object was not attained, and we set forward with replenished vigour, to cross the heather-heath, whose bleak aspect prepared us for the paradise which smiled below the other side of the hills.  The first prominent object which met our view, was the terrace, with its classical temples at each of its terminations; and next, the wood encircled hamlet of Scawton, at whose little alehouse we enjoyed a hearty breakfast; and then set forward to explore our beloved region of Rievaulx; our path being through a mountainous wood, which nearly kissed the sky, and obscured the rustic road which divided it:  after several windings through this leafy labyrinth, we arrived at a point where the wood was more open, and the dell considerably wider.  It was after passing a picturesque cottage and bridge, that the first view of Rievaulx Abbey broke upon us.  It was then that the first outline of its “Gothic grandeur” was displayed to us.  Crossing the little bridge of Rieval, we proceeded along the banks of the Rye, which morosely rolled along, scarcely deigning to murmur its complaints to the woody hills which skirted it, as if in pique for the ruin of its sublime temple, and the disappearance of its monastic lords.  The village of Rieval, constructed out of the wreck of the spacious abbey, displays some reverence for the preservation of inscriptions dug out of the building; and the little windows which lit the cells of studious monks five hundred years ago, now grace the cottages of illiterate peasants.  We took a facsimile of one inscription, in Saxon letters, merely denoting the name of the monastery.

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