and fraught with misty history. It was a scene for a pilgrim, pregnant with peacefulness, and as lovely as a dream. Yet how simple was the prospect—a gray and ruined abbey, a silent world of green suffused with faint sunshine that filtered through the thin clouds above! Below us and before us stretched the river gleaming for miles between its sloping banks, winding away towards the picturesque pile of ancient devotion in curving parallels that narrowed toward the distant horizon to a mere point; and this describes all that was before us!
After the abbey's pathetic ruins, beautiful with the beauty of decay, what most struck us was the sense of solitude, silence, and space in our surroundings. On every side the level Fenland stretched broad as the sea, and to the eye appearing almost as wide and as free; and from all this vast lowland tract came no sound except the hardly to be distinguished mellow murmuring of the wind amongst the nearer sedges and trees. The river flowed on below us in sluggish contentment without even an audible gurgle; no birds were singing, and, as far as we could see, there were no birds to sing; and in the midst of this profound stillness our very voices seemed preternaturally loud. There are two such things as a cheerful silence and a depressing silence; the difference between these two is more to be felt than described: of course all silence is relative, for such a thing as absolute silence is not to be found in this world; but the quietude of the Fens, like that of the mountain-top, simulates the latter very successfully. The thick atmosphere about us had
