Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/39

36 Captain Hall's good taste was shocked at oar leaving Southampton without seeing Netley Abbey; and surely to leave this out, in seeing England, would be much like the omission of the Midsummer's Night's Dream in reading Shakspeare. So yesterday morning, with a sky as clear, and almost as deep as our own summer-sky, we set off, accompanied by the Halls, for these beautiful ruins. They are much more entire than those of Carisbrooke. The walls are standing, and how long they have been so is touchingly impressed upon you by the tall trees that have grown up in the unroofed apartments. Shrubs four or five feet high fringe the tops of the walls, and flowers are rooted in the crevices. It seemed as if Nature, with a feeling of kindred for a beautiful work of art, would fain hide the wounds she could not heal—wounds of violence as well as time.

I shall spare you any description, for I should waste your time and mine. No description can convey as definite an idea as any of the hundred engravings you have seen of Netley Abbey; and I am sorry to say to you, that even a Daguerreotype picture would give you no adequate impression of its beauty. There is nothing for you but to come and see these places; their soul, their history, their associations are untransfuseable. I have no extraordinary sensibility to such things, and I saw —— smiling at my tears; and glad I should have been to have passed a day alone there, to have trodden the ground with undisturbed recollections is of those who reared