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.]

The river-scenery changes below Llangollen, and gives us first a glimpse of a wooded, narrow valley, then of the unsightly accessories of the great North Wales coalfield, after which it enters upon a typically English phase—­low undulating hills and moist, rich meadows divided by luxuriant hedges and dotted with single spreading trees.  The hedgerow timber of Cheshire is beautiful, and to a great extent makes up for the want of tracts of wooded land.  This country is not, like the Midland counties and the great Fen district, violently or exclusively agricultural, and these hedges and trees, which are gratefully kept up for the sake of the shade they afford to the cattle, show a very different temper among the farmers from that utilitarianism which marks the men of Leicester shire, Lincoln, Nottingham, Norfolk, or Rutland.  There even great land-owners are often obliged to humor their tenants, and keep the unwelcome hedges trimmed so as not to interpose two feet of shade between them and the wheat-crop; and as often as possible hedges are replaced by ugly stone walls or wooden fences.  It is only in their own grounds that landlords can afford to court picturesqueness, and in this part of the country the American who is said to have objected to hedges because they were unfit for seats whence to admire the landscape, might safely sit down anywhere; only, as matters are seldom perfectly arranged, there is very little to admire but a flat expanse of wheat,