To every American, sympathising with these sentiments, it must be interesting to visit such a rural little city as Ripon, and find populations that cling with reverence and affection to the old Saxon institutions of Alfred.  It will make him feel that he stands in the unbroken lineage of the centuries, to hear the wakeman’s horn, and to know that it has been blown, spring, summer, autumn and winter, in all weathers, in weal and in woe, for a thousand years.  As Old England is driven farther and farther back from London, Manchester, Liverpool, and other great improving towns, she will find refuge and residence in these retired country villages.  Here she will wear longest and last the features in which she was engraven on the minds of all the millions who call her mother beyond the sea.

The next day I visited the celebrated Fountain Abbey in Studley Park,—­a grand relic of antiquity, framed with silver and emerald work of lakelets, lawns, shrubberies and trees as beautifully arranged as art, taste and wealth could set them.  The old abbey is a majestic ruin which fills one with wonder as he looks up at its broken arches and towers and sees the dimensions marked by the pedestals or foot-prints of its templed columns.  It stands rather in a narrow glen than in a valley, and was commenced, it is supposed, about 1130.  The yew-trees under which the monks bivouacked while at work upon the magnificent edifice, are still standing, bearing leaves as large and green as those that covered the enthusiastic architects of that early time.  In the height of its prosperity and power, the lands of the abbey embraced over 72,000 acres.  The Park enclosing this great monument of an earlier age contains 250 acres, and is really an earthly elysium of beauty.  It was comforting to learn that it was laid out so late as 1720, and that all the noble trees that filled it had grown to their present grandeur within the intervening period.  Here I saw for the first time in England our hard-maple.  It was a spindling thing, looking as if it had suffered much from fever and ague or rheumatism; but it was pleasant to see it admitted into a larger fellowship of trees than our New England soil ever bore.  On a green, lawn-faced slope, at the turning of the principal walk, there was a little tree a few feet high enclosed in by a circular wire fence.  It was planted by the Princess of Wales on a visit of the royal pair to Studley soon after their marriage.  The fair Dane left her card in this way to the old Abbey, which began to rise upon its foundations soon after the stalwart Danish sovereign of England fell at the Battle of Hastings.  Will any one of her posterity ever bear his name and sit upon the throne he vacated for that bloody grave?  No!  She will remember a better name at the font.  The day and the name of the Harolds, Williams, Henrys, Charles’s, and Georges are over and gone forever.  ALBERT THE GOOD has estopped that succession; and England, doubtless, for centuries to come, will wear that name and its memories in her crown.