1901-1902. |] Presidential Address. 393 
‘Oh, hear a pensive prisoner’s prayer, 
For liberty that sighs ; 
And never let thine heart be shut 
Against the wretch’s cries ! 
If eer thy breast with freedom glow’d, 
And spurned a tyrant’s chain ; 
Let not thy strong oppressive force 
A free-born Mouse detain ! 
The well-taught philosophic mind 
To all compassion gives ; 
Casts round the world an equal eye, 
And feels for all that lives.” 
How much does the observant, tutored eye add to the 
pleasure of a ramble in the country! It transforms what 
might otherwise seem to be but the bare walls of an 
unsightly warehouse into a gallery of the most beautiful of 
pictures—baffling to the most skilled of artists—which neither 
wealth can purchase nor power deprive us from seeing and 
enjoying. 
Nature, too, comes in at last with her kindly hand, tucks in 
snugly under the daisies, covering with her lovely mantle the 
decay that comes at last to all here below, concealing that 
death which, had we but eyes to see, is really but the 
beginning of a new and better life. 
In our rambles we have wandered around and within the 
roofless, ruined abbey, with its grass-grown floor, its unglazed 
and broken windows, its desolated aisles and its crumbling 
walls, painted, as no human artist ever could, with the silver- 
grey and golden-yellow of the close-clinging lichen ; adorned 
with the wallflower, “grey Ruin’s golden crown that lendest 
melancholy grace to haunts of old renown”; the moss, 
“nature’s livery round the globe”; the graceful fern; the 
repellent nettle ; and “old Scotia’s sweet blue-bell” ; the yew- 
tree, which “lends its greenness to the grave”’; the thistle, also, 
“pledge to the memory of departed worth”; and verdantly 
covered over by the ivy, whose “home is where each sound of 
revelry hath long been o’er; where songs’ full notes once 
pealed around, but now are heard no more,” and which “ lov’st 
the silent scene, around the victor’s grave.” We hear, too, the 
