CROWLAND ABBEY solemn thunder-tones. The poetry and the romance of the ancient faith and days have departed, and the prosaic present strikes a purely pathetic key—of things that have been and are no more! The ancient abbey
in ruin stands lone in the solitude;
The wild birds sing above it, and the ivy clings around,
And under its poppies its old-time worshippers sleep sound:
Relic of days forgotten, dead form of an ancient faith,
Haunting the light of the present, a vanished Past's dim wraith!
And the winds wail up from the seaward, and sigh in the long grave grass
A message of weltering tides, and of things that were and must pass.
Reluctantly, as I have said, we left this lonely Fenland fane, a legend in stone: a dream of Gothic glory in its prime, and a thing of beauty in decay; and beauty is a more precious possession than glory! Very beautiful did the ancient ruin look as we took our farewell glance at it, with the warm sun's rays touching tenderly its gray-toned walls and lightening up their century-gathered gloom, whilst the solemn shadows of pillared recesses and deep-*set arches lent a mystic glamour to the pile, as though it held some hidden secrets of the past there, not to be revealed to modern mortals, all of which aroused our strongest sympathies, or a feeling close akin thereto—for I know not for certain whether mere inert matter can really arouse human sympathy, though I think it can.
This wild and wide Fenland was anciently renowned for its many and wealthy monasteries.
