e charm. The feelings excited by both characters are
definitely connected by the melancholy tradition of the circumstances to
which the Abbey owes its origin; and yet farther darkened by the nearer
memory of the death, in the same spot which betrayed the boy of
Egremont, of another, as young, as thoughtless, and as beloved.

"The stately priory was reared,
And Wharfe, as he moved along,
To matins joined a mournful voice,
Nor failed at evensong."

All this association of various awe, and noble mingling of mountain
strength with religious fear, Turner had to suggest, or he would not
have drawn Bolton Abbey. He goes down to the shingly shore; for the
Abbey is but the child of the Wharfe;--it is the river, the great cause
of the Abbey, which shall be his main subject; only the extremity of the
ruin itself is seen between the stems of the ash tree; but the waves of
the Wharfe are studied with a care which renders this drawing unique
among Turner's works, for its expression of the eddies of a slow
mountain stream, and of their pausing in treacherous depth beneath the
hollowed rocks.

[Illustration: 12. The Shores of Wharfe.]

On the opposite shore is a singular jutting angle of the shales, forming
the principal feature of the low cliffs at the water's edge. Turner
fastens on it as the only available mass; draws it with notable care,
and then magnifies it, by diminishing the trees on its top to one fifth
of their real size, so that what would else have been little more than a
stony bank becomes a true precipice, on a scale completely suggestive of
the heights behind. The hill beyond is in like manner lifted into a more
rounded, but still precipitous, eminence, reaching the utmost admissible
elevation of ten or twelve hundred feet (measurable by the trees upon
it). I have engraved this entire portion of the drawing of the real
size, on the opposite page; the engraving of the whole drawing,
published in the England Series, is also easily accessible.

[Illustration: FIG. 83.]

Sec. 33. Not knowing accurately to what group of the Yorkshire limestones
the rocks opposite the Abbey belonged, or their relation to the
sandstones at the Strid, I wrote to ask my kind friend Professor
Phillips, who instantly sent me a little geological sketch of the
position of these "Yoredale Shales," adding this interesting note: "The
black shales opposite the Abbey are curiously tinted at the surface, and
are contorted. Most arti