With the situation of St. Mary's Abbey Dorothy Wordsworth was fain to avow herself disappointed. When she came to Melrose she found it "almost surrounded by insignificant houses," which is even truer now than it was then; and she adds that even when viewed from a distance the position did not seem happy, for the church was not close to the river, "so that you do not look upon them as companions to each other." This has been rebuked as "somewhat captious;" but one presumes to think it nothing of the kind. In itself, however, the Abbey is fair beyond description; it would be as difficult to adversely criticise as it is to adequately praise it. To justly appreciate its proportions, graceful and imposing even in its ruin, and with the central tower bereft of its rood-spire, it should be seen from one of the summits of Eildon; yet its details, when minutely scrutinised on the spot, are still more admirable. Burns, before his time in his appreciation of Gothic architecture as in some other things, speaks of it as "a glorious ruin;" to Sir Walter's mind it was "the finest specimen of Gothic architecture and Gothic sculpture which Scotland can boast." It is, in sooth, one of the crowning achievements of the Gothic, with most of its merits and almost none of its faults. Exuberantly ornamented, it never oversteps the thin line which separates richness from redundancy. Even the great east window, built after Richard II.'s devastations in 1385, when the Gothic had passed its prime, has a grace and harmony which justify all the admiration usually accorded to its size; while it is preserved from the stiffness which is the besetting sin of the Perpendicular by the foliaged tracery that knits the long mullions together. The window in the south transept, also in five lights, is, however, to be preferred before it, although considerably smaller; it is in the Second Pointed, or Decorated style, to which the greater part of the ruin belongs, and the lines into which its mullions flow are of indescribable loveliness. The carving on capital and corbel, on boss and buttress, has an elaborate yet dainty beauty such as is seldom met with on either side of the Tweed, and must of a truth be the work of hands that were made cunning by love of art and patient by a sense of pious duty.