Llangollen Vale has a beauty of its own, the family likeness of which to that of all valleys in the hearts of mountains makes it none the less welcome. The picturesqueness of thatched houses and a dilapidation of masonry which only age makes beautiful marks the difference between this valley and the Alpine ones with their trim, clean toy houses, or the Transatlantic ones with their square, solid, black log huts and huge well-sweeps; otherwise the fresh greenery, the purple mountain-shadows, the subdued sounds, no one knows whence, the sense of peace and solitude, are akin to every other beautiful valley-scene of mingled wildness and cultivation. A traveller can hardly help making comparisons, yet much escapes him of the peculiar charm that hangs round every place, and is too subtle to disclose itself to the eye of a mere passer. You must live at least six months in one place before its true character unfolds: the broad beauties you see at once, but it needs the microscope of habit to find out the rarest charms. Therefore it is much easier to descant on the tangible, striking beauty of Valle Crucis Abbey than on the aggregate loveliness of Llangollen Vale; and perhaps it is this lack of familiarity that leads novelists, poets and others to dwell so much more and with such detail on buildings than on natural scenery. It may not be given them to understand upon how much higher a plane of beauty stands a bed of ferns on a rocky ledge, a clump of trees even on a flat meadow, and especially a tangled forest-scene or a view of distant mountains in a sunset glow, or the surface of water undotted by a sail, than the highest effect of man-made beauty, be it even York Minster or the Parthenon. What man does has value by reason of the meaning in it, and of course man cannot but fall short of the perfection of his own meaning; whereas Nature is of herself perfection, and perfection in which there is no effort. Valle Crucis is hardly a rival of Fountains or Rivaulx. The Cistercians in the beginning of their foundation were reformers, ascetic, and essentially agriculturists. Their great leader, Bernard of Clairvaux, the advocate of silence and work, once said, "Believe me, I have learnt more from trees than ever I learnt from men." But decay came even into this community of farmer-monks, and the praise and panegyric of the abbey, as handed down to us by a Welsh poet, betray unconsciously things hardly to the credit of a monastic house, for the abbot, "the pope of the glen," he tells us, gave entertainments "like the leaves in summer," with "vocal and instrumental music," wine, ale and curious dishes of fish and fowl, "like a carnival feast," and "a thousand apples for dessert." [Illustration: OWEN GLENDOWER'S PRISON.] [Illustration: THE PARLIAMENT HOUSE, DOLGELLY.]