solemn thunder-tones. The poetry and the romance of the ancient faith and days have departed, and the prosaic present strikes a purely pathetic key—of things that have been and are no more! The ancient abbey
in ruin stands lone in the solitude;
The wild birds sing above it, and the ivy clings around,
And under its poppies its old-time worshippers sleep sound:
Relic of days forgotten, dead form of an ancient faith,
Haunting the light of the present, a vanished Past’s dim wraith!
. . . . . . .
And the winds wail up from the seaward, and sigh in the long grave grass
A message of weltering tides, and of things that were and must pass.
Reluctantly, as I have said, we left this lonely Fenland fane, a legend in stone: a dream of Gothic glory in its prime, and a thing of beauty in decay; and beauty is a more precious possession than glory! Very beautiful did the ancient ruin look as we took our farewell glance at it, with the warm sun’s rays touching tenderly its gray-toned walls and lightening up their century-gathered gloom, whilst the solemn shadows of pillared recesses and deepset arches lent a mystic glamour to the pile, as though it held some hidden secrets of the past there, not to be revealed to modern mortals, all of which aroused our strongest sympathies, or a feeling close akin thereto—for I know not for certain whether mere inert matter can really arouse human sympathy, though I think it can.
This wild and wide Fenland was anciently renowned for its many and wealthy monasteries. A medieval rhyme has been preserved to us that relates the traditional reputations these religious establishments respectively had. Of this rhyme there are two versions, one is as follows:—
Ramsey, the bounteous of gold and of fee;
Crowland, as courteous as courteous may be;
Spalding the rich, and Peterborough the proud;
Sawtrey, by the way, that poore abbaye,
Gave more alms in one day
Than all they.
The other version runs more fully thus:—
Ramsey, the rich of gold and of fee,
Thorney, the flower of many a fair tree,
Crowland, the courteous of their meat and drink,
Spalding, the gluttons, as all people do think,
Peterborough, the proud, as all men do say:
Sawtrey, by the way, that old abbey,
Gave more alms in one day than all they.
From Crowland we decided to drive some nine and a half miles on to Spalding, where we proposed to spend the night; or rather the map decided the matter, for our choice of roads out of Crowland, unless we went south, was limited to this one; it was a pure case of “Hobson’s choice,” to Spalding we must go, and thither we went. Mounting the dog-cart once more we were soon in the open country; our road, like that of the morning, was level and winding, with the far-reaching fens all around, that stretched away through greens, yellows, russets, and grays to a hazy horizon of blue. A short distance on our way by the roadside we observed a large notice-board, that claimed our
A WAYSIDE RECORD
attention from its size, so we pulled up the better to examine it, and found this legend plainly painted thereon:—