ows. I must not forget that birds flew in and out among the
recesses, and chirped and warbled, and made themselves at home there.
Doubtless, the birds of the present generation are the posterity of
those who first settled in the ruins, after the Reformation; and perhaps
the old monks of a still earlier day may have watched them building
about the abbey, before it was a ruin at all.

* * * * *

From the "American Note Books."

=_301._= SCENERY OF THE MERRIMAC.

I never could have conceived that there was so beautiful a river-scene
in Concord as this of the North Branch. The stream flows through the
midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood, which, as if but half
satisfied with its presence, calm, gentle and unobtrusive as it is,
seems to crowd upon it, and barely to allow it passage, for the trees
are rooted on the very verge of the water, and dip their pendent
branches into it. On one side there is a high bank forming the side of a
hill, the Indian name of which I have forgotten, though Mr. Thoreau told
it to me; and here in some instances the trees stand leaning over the
river, stretching out their arms as if about to plunge in headlong. On
the other side, the bank is almost on a level with the water, and there
the quiet congregation of trees stood with feet in the flood, and
fringed with foliage down to its very surface. Vines here and there
twine themselves about bushes or aspens or alder-trees, and hang their
clusters, though scanty and infrequent this season, so that I can reach
them from my boat, I scarcely remember a scene of more complete and
lovely seclusion than the passage of the river through this wood. Even
an Indian canoe in olden times, could not have floated onward in deeper
solitude than my boat. I have never elsewhere had such an opportunity to
observe how much more beautiful reflection is than what we call reality.
The sky and the clustering foliage on either hand, and the effect of
sunlight as it found its way through the shade, giving lightsome hues in
contrast with the quiet depth of the prevailing tints, all these
seemed unsurpassably beautiful when beheld in upper air. But on gazing
downward, there they were, the same even to the minutest particular, yet
arrayed in ideal beauty which satisfied the spirit incomparably more
than the actual scene. I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed
the reality, the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our