An early start next morning, a short railway trip, and then a stage-coach drive of two miles, and then a walk through the fields, brought me to S—— parsonage, before breakfast, where a kindly welcome awaited me from my Malvern acquaintances. A day had been planned for me by the kind lady of the parsonage, and though it threatened rain, she laughed at the idea of abandoning it on that account. An American lady would scarcely have thought of it, even in fair weather, as the excursion involved not a little exercise of the foot. Off we went in a pony-carriage to Ripon, where I had time for a hasty inspection of the minster, lately made a cathedral. It is a severe specimen of Early English, and affords much to interest the student; but very little to make a story of, unless we adopt Camden’s explanation of St. Wilfrid’s needle in the crypt. It is a narrow perforation of the masonry, through which ladies were sometimes required to pass, when, as Fuller says, “those who could not thread the needle pricked their own credit.” We went through the grounds of Studley Royal, enjoying a diversified view of beautiful park scenery, till we came to the neighbourhood of Fountains Abbey, and exchanged our drive for a walk. We passed through woods, and by little lakes, and over rustic bridges, and came at last into a walk richly embowered with trees, along a height, where the foliage completely screened the view below. Our fair conductress promised us a lunch at a little halting-place called Anne Boleyn’s Seat. I did not tell her that I had foreknowledge of the trick she meant to play upon me; but I sincerely wish that I had never heard of it, for my own sake as well as hers. Arrived at the spot, we sat down to rest, when suddenly the lady flung open a door, and before us was such a view as can be seen nowhere else in the world. We were balconied, in a lofty window, and below was the beautiful valley and meadow: at the extremity of which, rise the ancient walls, chapel window, and tower of Fountains Abbey—the most poetical ruin in existence. All Italy has nothing to show, that can be compared with it for beauty, especially if we take into account the extraordinary charms of the wooded steeps that surround it, and of the green velvet mead, from which it lifts itself like the creation of enchantment. Its architecture is vast and majestic in scale, and the ivy has contrived to festoon and mantle its magnificence, in such wise as to lend it a grace it never could have possessed even in its first glory. There is a more sylvan charm about Tintern. Fountains Abbey is the perfection of artificial beauty, for even its surrounding nature is impressed with a look of long and complete subjugation to the hand of consummate art.