“Not content with every kind of food to nourish man, Thou makest all Nature beauty to his eye And music to his ear.” There are no bolts, bars, or boundary walls, and there need be “No calling left, no duty broke,” in making ourselves more acquainted than we are, by holiday rambles and dignifying investigations, with wonders which constantly surround us. [Picture: Valley of the Severn as seen from the hill near Coalport Incline Plane] Few more interesting spots could be chosen than Ironbridge, with its woods, and cliffs, and river, which from tourists, and all lovers of the beautiful, never fail at once to secure attention and admiration. You may travel far and not meet a page so interesting in nature’s history. Many are the occasional visits—many are the stated pilgrimages, made from distances—by devotees of science, desirous of here reading the “testimony of the rocks.” To such, this natural rent in the earth’s crust; this rocky cleft, the severed sides of which, like simple sections of a puzzle, afford the clue to its original outline and primæval features, and prove full of interest. Like some excavated ruin, flooring above flooring, there are platforms and stages where in rearing the old world’s structure the workers rested. Coins of that far off period are plentiful where human habitations now stand, terrace above terrace. Other than these, the little town has no antiquities older than its bridge; other than the hunting lodge and half-timber-houses previously mentioned; there are no castle keeps, cathedral aisles, or moss-crowned ruins; no suggestive monuments of the past save those already noticed and such as nature furnishes. ’Tis rich in these; these it has mature and undecayed: and in such mute eloquence as no work of man can boast. Massive and motionless there are around the most interesting and instructive specimens of the world’s architecture. Not a winding path threads the hill side but conducts to some such memorial, but opens some page written within and without. Take the favourite summer’s walk of the inhabitants, that leading to the Rotunda, on the crest of the hill; and you stand upon the mute relics of a former world! Beneath is the upturned bed of a former sea, and around is the storied mausoleum where hundreds of the world’s lost species lie entombed. Few places boast a more suggestive or more romantic scene. Lower still, just at “The swelling instep of the hill,”