The rest of the day was devoted to an excursion to Tintern, to which the ladies contributed their agreeable society. The party proved a very cheerful one, and we encountered scarcely any fatigue of which our fairer associates did not bear their full share. In surveying the remains of Chepstow castle, only, were we without their company. I found it a noble ruin, even after my visit to Caernarvon. It was reduced to ruin by Cromwell, after a desperate fight, but one of its towers was long afterwards—for twenty years—the prison of Henry Marten, the regicide. It must once have been a splendid hold of feudalism, and its halls and windows still retain many traces of the Saxon and Norman richness of its original beauty. We climbed the Windcliff, and thence surveyed the combined glories of land, and sea, and of inland stream, which are its peculiar charm. Where else can be seen such a prospect: such inland river scenery, blended with the view of a broad arm of ocean, side by side, and apparently not united? It would be vain for me to attempt description, but I found it all I could ask; and on that breezy height recalled to mind those incomparable lines of Wordsworth, composed upon the spot or near it, in which he exhorts the lover of Nature to store up such scenes in memory, and thus make “the mind a mansion for all lovely forms.” There are caves below, through which one of my female friends led me like a Sybil; and then I went under her kind escort through a wild American-like wood, to rejoin our carriage. Two miles more of delightful scenery, and I stood again in Tintern Abbey, and wandered through its holy aisles, and climbed to its venerable summit. Here, over the lofty arches of the transept, I walked, as in a path through a wood, the shrubbery growing wildly on both sides, as on the brow of a natural cliff. White roses flourish there in abundance; and it is only at intervals that you can get a glimpse of the Abbey-floor beneath. Around you is a beautiful prospect of the river, and of an amphitheatre of hills; and when you stand in the aisles below, and view these same hills through the broken windows, you feel that they should never have been glazed, except with transparent glass. On the whole, when the beauty of its situation is fully taken into consideration, in addition to the original graces of its architecture,—its graceful pillars, its aerial arches, its gorgeous windows,—and when we observe the fond effect with which nature has clothed the pile in verdure, as if resuming her power with tenderness, and striving to repair the decays of art, with her own triumphant creations; when all these, and other attractions which cannot be enumerated in description, are united in the estimate, I cannot but give to Tintern Abbey the credit of being the fairest sight, of its kind, which ever filled my vision. I have since seen many similar objects, combining architectural beauties with those of nature, but were I