Furness Abbey, seven miles south-west of Ulverston, once the most extensive and beautiful of the English Cistercian houses,--which held charters from twelve successive kings, and whose abbots had jurisdiction, not only ecclesiastical but civil, over the whole of the great peninsula formed by the Duddon, the Leven, Windermere, and the sea,--still attests in the variety and the stateliness of the remains that the "pomp and circumstance" of monastic authority must here have been played forth to the utmost limit. In its day the building must have been perfect alike in design and commodiousness. The outermost walls enclosed no less than sixty-five acres of ground, including the portion used as a garden. This great area was traversed by a clear and swiftly flowing stream, which still runs on its ancient way; and the slopes of the sequestered glen chosen with so much sagacity as the site, were covered with trees. To-day their descendants mingle also with the broken arches; these last receiving comfort again from the faithful campanula, which in its season decks every ledge and crumbling corbel, flowering, after its manner, luxuriantly--a reflex of the "heavens' own tinct," smiling, as Nature always does, upon the devastation she so loves to adorn. The contrast of the lively hues of the vegetation with the gray-red tint of the native sandstone employed by the builders, now softened and subdued by the touch of centuries, the painter alone can portray. When sunbeams glance through, falling on the shattered arcades with the subtle tenderness which makes sunshine, when it creeps into such places, seem, like our own footsteps, conscious and reverent, the effects are chaste and animating beyond expression. Even when the skies are clouded, the long perspectives, the boldness with which the venerable walls rise out of the sod, the infinite diversity of the parts,--to say nothing of the associations,--render this glorious ruin one of the most fascinating in our country.