Page:Over fen and wold; (IA overfenwold00hissiala).pdf/199

 low circling line of the bounding horizon. Though we could not have been raised much above sea-level, still I have climbed high mountains for a far inferior view. It is not the height one may be above a scene that gives the observer therefrom the best impression of it; indeed one may easily be elevated too far above scenery to appreciate it properly. A bird's-eye view of a landscape is not the one an artist would select to paint; there is such a thing as a picturesque and an unpicturesque way of looking on an object. Sometimes, truly, scenery has been painted as a bird sees it, for the sake of novelty; but novelty is not synonymous with beauty: they may join hands at times, but as a rule they are utter strangers one to another.

Then as we drove slowly and carefully on—for there were no fences to the road on either side and it was not over safe to approach too near the edges, or we might have been precipitated into the river on one hand, or on to the fields below on the other, either of which events would have brought our outing to a sudden termination—as we drove thus cautiously on, the one remaining tower and great vacant archway of Crowland's lonely abbey came into sight, standing out a tender pearly-gray mass against the sunlit sky: in all the ocean of greenery round about there was nothing else in sight that raised itself noticeably above the general level.

There was something very impressive in this first view of the ancient fane, rising in crumbling yet solemn majesty out of the ever-green world below; a poem in stone, laden with ancient legend