f old planes in the Circus; the whole town, the design
in the classic style of one master mind, set by the Avon, amid green
hills, produced a sense of harmony and repose which cannot be equalled
by any other town in the kingdom.

This idle time was delightful so long as I gave my attention exclusively
to houses from the outside, and to hills, rocks, trees, waters, and all
visible nature, which here harmonizes with man's works. To sit on some
high hill and look down on Bath, sun-flushed or half veiled in mist; to
lounge on Camden Crescent, or climb Sion Hill, or take my ease with the
water-drinkers in the spacious, comfortable Pump Room; or, better still,
to rest at noon in the ancient abbey--all this was pleasure pure and
simple, a quiet drifting back until I found myself younger by five years
than I had taken myself to be.

I haunted the abbey, and the more I saw of it the more I loved it. The
impression it had made on me during my former visits had faded, or else
I had never properly seen it, or had not seen it in the right emotional
mood. Now I began to think it the best of all the great abbey churches
of England and the equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind.
How rich the interior is in its atmosphere of tempered light or tender
gloom! How tall and graceful the columns holding up the high roof of
white stone with its marvellous palm-leaf sculpture! What a vast expanse
of beautifully stained glass! I certainly gave myself plenty of time to
appreciate it on this occasion, as I visited it every day, sometimes
two or three times, and not infrequently I sat there for an hour at a
stretch.

Sitting there one day, thinking of nothing, I was gradually awakened
to a feeling almost of astonishment at the sight of the extraordinary
number of memorial tablets of every imaginable shape and size which
crowd the walls. So numerous are they and so closely placed that you
could not find space anywhere to put your hand against the wall. We are
accustomed to think that in cathedrals and other great ecclesiastical
buildings the illustrious dead receive burial, and their names and
claims on our gratitude and reverence are recorded, but in no fane in
the land is there so numerous a gathering of the dead as in this place.
The inscription-covered walls were like the pages of an old black-letter
volume without margins. Yet when I came to think of it I could not
recall any Bath celebrity or great person associated with Bath exce