Sec. 30. The Abbey is placed, as most lovers of our English scenery know
well, on a little promontory of level park land, enclosed by one of the
sweeps of the Wharfe. On the other side of the river, the flank of the
dale rises in a pretty wooded brow, which the river, leaning against,
has cut into two or three somewhat bold masses of rock, steep to the
water's edge, but feathered above with copse of ash and oak. Above these
rocks, the hills are rounded softly upwards to the moorland; the entire
height of the brow towards the river being perhaps two hundred feet, and
the rocky parts of it not above forty or fifty, so that the general
impression upon the eye is that the hill is little more than twice the
height of the ruins, or of the groups of noble ash trees which encircle
them. One of these groups is conspicuous above the rest, growing on the
very shore of the tongue of land which projects into the river, whose
clear brown water, stealing first in mere threads between the separate
pebbles of shingle, and eddying in soft golden lines towards its central
currents, flows out of amber into ebony, and glides calm and deep below
the rock on the opposite shore.

Sec. 31. Except in this stony bed of the stream, the scene possesses very
little more aspect of mountain character than belongs to some of the
park and meadow land under the chalk hills near Henley and Maidenhead;
and if it were faithfully drawn in all points, and on its true scale,
would hardly more affect the imagination of the spectator, unless he
traced, with such care as is never from any spectator to be hoped, the
evidence of nobler character in the pebbled shore and unconspicuous
rock. But the scene in reality does affect the imagination strongly, and
in a way wholly different from lowland hill scenery. A little farther up
the valley the limestone summits rise, and that steeply, to a height of
twelve hundred feet above the river, which foams between them in the
narrow and dangerous channel of the Strid. Noble moorlands extend above,
purple with heath, and broken into scars and glens, and around every
soft tuft of wood, and gentle extent of meadow, throughout the dale,
there floats a feeling of this mountain power, and an instinctive
apprehension of the strength and greatness of the wild northern land.

Sec. 32. It is to the association of this power and border sternness with
the sweet peace and tender decay of Bolton Priory, that the scene owes
its distinctiv