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.
I never could have conceived that there was so beautiful a river-scene
in Concord as this of the North Branch. The stream flows through the
midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood, which, as if but half
satisfied with its presence, calm, gentle and unobtrusive as it is,
seems to crowd upon it, and barely to allow it passage, for the trees
are rooted on the very verge of the water, and dip their pendent
branches into it.
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