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.