Ward Beecher has said, nothing, perhaps, is more impressive than his account of his partaking of the communion at that altar in the church where Shakspeare rests. A memory more divine than his overshadowed the place, and he thought of Shakspeare," as he thought of ten thousand things, without the least disturbance of his devotion," though he was kneeling directly over the poet's dust.

If you will stroll over to Shottery now with me, we can see the Ann Hathaway cottage from four different points, which will leave nothing outside of it to be seen. Better to look at than to live in. A fearful old place, full of small vertebrates that squeak and smaller articulates that bite, if its outward promise can be trusted. A thick thatch covers it like a coarse-haired hide. It is patched together with bricks and timber, and partly crusted with scaling plaster. One window has the diamond panes framed in lead, such as we remember seeing of old in one or two ancient dwellings in the town of Cambridge, hard by. In this view a young man is sitting, pensive, on the steps which Master William, too ardent lover, used to climb with hot haste and descend with lingering delay. Young men die, but youth lives. Life goes on in the cottage just as it used to three hundred years ago. On the rail before the door sits the puss of the household, of the fiftieth generation, perhaps, from that "harmless, necessary cat" which purred round the poet's legs as he sat talking love with Ann Hathaway. At the foot of the steps is a huge basin, and over the rail hangs-a dishcloth, drying. In these homely accidents of the very instant, that cut across our romantic ideals with the sharp edge of reality, lies one of the ineffable charms of the sun-picture. It is a little thing that gives life to a scene or a face; portraits are never absolutely alive, because they do not wink.

Come, we are full of Shakspeare; let us go up among the hills and see where another poet lived and lies. Here is Rydal Mount, the home of Wordsworth. Two-storied, ivy-clad, hedge-girdled,

dropped into a crease among the hills that look down dimly from above, as if they were hunting after it as ancient dames hunt after a dropped thimble. In these walks he used to go "booing about," as his rustic neighbor had it,- reciting his own verses. Here is his grave in Grasmere. A plain slab, with nothing. but his name. Next him lies Dora, his daughter, beneath a taller stone bordered with a tracery of ivy, and bearing in relief a lamb and a cross. Her husband lies next in the range. The three graves have just been shorn of their tall grass, in this other view you may see them half-hidden by it. A few flowering stems have escaped the scythe in the first picture, and nestle close against the poet's headstone. Hard by sleeps poor Hartley Coleridge, with a slab of freestone graven with a cross and a crown of thorns, and the legend, "By thy Cross and Passion, Good Lord, deliver us.”* All around are the graves of those whose names the world has not known. This view, (302,) from above Rydal Mount, is so Claude-like, especially in its trees, that one wants the solemn testimony of the double-picture to believe it an actual transcript of Nature. Of the other English landscapes we have seen, one of the most pleasing on the whole is that marked 43,-Sweden Bridge, near Ambleside. But do not fail to notice St. Mary's Church (101) in the same mountain-village. It grows out of the ground like a crystal, with spur-like gables budding out all the way up its spire, as if they were ready to flower into pinnacles, like such as have sprung up all over the marble multiflora of Milan.

And as we have been looking at a steeple, let us flit away for a moment and pay our reverence at the foot of the tallest spire in England,- that of Salisbury Cathedral. Here we see it from below,

* Miss Martineau, who went to his funeral, and may be supposed to describe after a visit to the churchyard, gives the inscription incorrectly. See Atlantic Monthly for May, 1861, p. 552. Tourists cannot be trusted; stereographs can.

looking up,-one of the most striking pictures ever taken. Look well at it; Chichester has just fallen, and this is a good deal like it, some have thought raised by the same builder. It has bent some what (as you may see in these other views) from the perpendicular; and though it has been strengthened with clamps and framework, it must crash some day or other, for there has been a great giant tugging at it day and night for five hundred years, and it will at last shut up into itself or topple over with a sound and thrill that will make the dead knights and bishops shake on their stone couches, and be remembered all their days by year-old children. This is the first cathedral we ever saw, and none ever so impressed us since. Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five or six-foot personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with the little life of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your heart seems too trivial a movement to take reckoning of. In the buttressed hollow of one of these palæozoic cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which your breathing structure reposes. Before we leave Salisbury, let us look for a moment into its cloisters.

A green

court-yard, with a covered gallery on its level, opening upon it through a series of Gothic arches. You may learn more, young American, of the difference between your civilization and that of the Old World by one look at this than from an average lyceum-lecture an hour long. Seventy years of life means a great deal to you; how little, comparatively, to the dweller in these cloisters! You will have seen a city grow up about you, perhaps; your whole world will have been changed half a dozen times over. What change

for him? The cloisters are just as when he entered them,-just as they were a hundred years ago,-just as they will be a hundred years hence.

These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison what are best worth seeing, of man's handiwork, in Europe. How great the delight to be able to bring them, bodily, as it were, to our own firesides! A hundred thousand pilgrims a year used to visit Canterbury. Now Canterbury visits us. See that small white mark on the pavement. That marks the place where the slice of Thomas à Becket's skull fell when Reginald Fitz Urse struck it off with a "Ha!" that seems to echo yet through the vaulted arches. And see the broad stairs, worn by the pilgrims' knees as they climbed to the martyr's shrine. For four hundred years this stream of worshippers was wearing itself into these stones. But there was the place where they knelt before the altar called "Becket's Crown." No! the story that those deep hollows in the marble were made by the pilgrims' knees is too much to believe,but there are the hollows, and that is the story.

-

And now, if you would see a perfect gem of the art of photography, and at the same time an unquestioned monument of antiquity which no person can behold without interest, look upon this,the monument of the Black Prince. There is hardly a better piece of work to be found. His marble effigy lies within a railing, with a sculptured canopy hung over it, like a sounding-board. Above this, on a beam stretched between two pillars, hang the arms he wore at the Battle of Poitiers,-the tabard, the shield, the helmet, the gauntlets, and the sheath that held his sword, which weapon it is said that Cromwell carried off. The outside casing of the shield has broken away, as you observe, but the lions or lizards, or whatever they were meant for, and the flower-de-luces or plumes may still be seen. The metallic scales, if such they were, have partially fallen from the tabard, or frock, and the leather shows bare in parts of it.

Here, hard by, is the sarcophagus of Henry IV. and his queen, also inclosed with a railing like the other. It was opened about thirty years ago, in presence of the dean of the cathedral. There was a doubt, so it was said, as to the monarch's body having been really buried there. Curiosity had nothing to do with it, it is to be presumed. Every over-ground sarcophagus is opened sooner or later, as a matter of course. It was hard work to get it open; it had to be sawed. They found a quantity of hay,— fresh herbage, perhaps, when it was laid upon the royal body four hundred years ago,—and a cross of twigs. A silken mask was on the face. They raised it and saw his red beard, his features well preserved, a gap in the front-teeth, which there was probably no court-dentist to supply, the same face the citizens looked on four centuries ago "In London streets that coronation-day,

When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary "; then they covered it up to take another nap of a few centuries, until another dean has an historical doubt,―at last, perhaps, to be transported by some future Australian Barnum to the Sidney Museum and exhibited as the mummy of one of the English Pharaohs. Look, too, at the "Warriors' Chapel," in the same cathedral. It is a very beautiful stereograph, and may be studied for a long time, for it is full of the most curious monuments.

Before leaving these English churches and monuments, let us enter, if but for a moment, the famous Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick. The finest of the views (323, 324) recalls that of the Black Prince's tomb, as a triumph of photography. Thus, while the whole effect of the picture is brilliant and harmonious, we shall find, on taking a lens, that we can count every individual bead in the chaplet of the monk who is one of the more conspicuous reliefs on the sarcophagus. The figure of this monk itself is about half an inch in height, and its face may be completely hidden by the head of a pin. The whole chapel is a marvel of workmanship and beauty. The monument of Richard Beauchamp in the centre, with

the frame of brass over the recumbent figure, intended to support the drapery thrown upon it to protect the statue,with the mailed shape of the warrior, his feet in long-pointed shoes resting against the muzzled bear and the griffin, his hands raised, but not joined, this monument, with the tomb of Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's Leicester, and that of the other Dudley, Earl of Warwick,-all enchased in these sculptured walls, and illuminated through that pictured window, where we can dimly see the outlines of saints and holy maidens, — form a group of monumental jewels such as only Henry VII.'s Chapel can equal. For these two pictures (323 and 324) let the poor student pawn his outside-coat, if he cannot have them otherwise.

Of abbeys and castles there is no end. No. 4, Tintern Abbey, is the finest, on the whole, we have ever seen. No. 2 is also very perfect and interesting. In both, the masses of ivy that clothe the ruins are given with wonderful truth and effect. Some of these views have the advantage of being very well colored. Warwick Castle (81) is one of the best and most interesting of the series of castles; Caernarvon is another still more striking.

We may as well break off here as anywhere, so far as England is concerned. England is one great burial-ground to an American. As islands are built up out of the shields of insects, so her soil is made from the bones of her innumerable generations. No one but a travelled American feels what it is to live in a land of monuments. We are all born foundlings, except here and there, in some favored spot, where humanity has nestled for a century or two. Cut flowers of romance and poetry stuck about are poor substitutes for the growths which have their roots in an old soil that has been changing elements with men and women like ourselves for thousands of years. Perhaps it is well that we should be forced to live mainly for the future; but it is sometimes weary and prosaic.

And yet, open this enchanted door (of pasteboard) which is the entrance to

the land of BURNS, and see what one man can do to idealize and glorify the examon life about him! Here is a poor "ten-footer," as we should call it, the cottage William "Burness" built with his own hands, where he carried his young bride Agnes, and where the boy ROBERT, his first-born, was given to the light and air which he made brighter and freer for mankind. Sit still and do not speak, — but see that your eyes do not grow dim as these pictures pass before them: The old hawthorn under which Burns sat with Highland Mary,—a venerable duenna-like tree, with thin arms and sharp elbows, and scanty chevelure of leaves; the Auld Brig o' Doon (No. 4),—a daring arch that leaps the sweet stream at a bound, more than half clad in a mantle of ivy, which has crept with its larva-like feet beyond the key-stone; the Twa Brigs of Ayr, with the beautiful reflections in the stream that shines under their eyebrow-arches; and poor little Alloway Kirk, with its fallen roof and high gables. Lift your hand to your eyes and draw a long breath,- for what words would come so near to us as these pictured, nay, real, memories of the dead poet who made a nation of a province, and the hearts of mankind its tributaries?

And so we pass to many-towered and turreted and pinnacled Abbotsford, and to large-windowed Melrose, and to peaceful Dryburgh, where, under a plain bevelled slab, lies the great Romancer whom Scotland holds only second in her affections to her great poet. Here in the foreground of the Melrose Abbey view (436) is a gravestone which looks as if it might be deciphered with a lens. us draw out this inscription from the black archives of oblivion. Here it is:

In Memory of Francis Cornel, late Labourer in Greenwell, Who died 11th July, 1827, aged 89 years. Also Margaret Betty, his Spouse, who died 2d Dec", 1831, aged 89 years.

Let

This is one charm, as we have said over and over, of the truth-telling photograph. We who write in great magazines of course float off from the wreck of our century, on our life-preserving articles, to immortality. What a delight it is to snatch at the unknown head that shows for an instant through the wave, and drag it out to personal recognition and a share in our own sempiternal buoyancy! Go and be photographed on the edge of Niagara, O unknown aspirant for human remembrance! Do not throw yourself, O traveller, into Etna, like Empedocles, but be taken by the camera standing on the edge of the crater! Who is that lady in the carriage at the door of Burns's cottage? Who is that gentleman in the shiny hat on the sidewalk in front of the Shakspeare house? Who are those two fair youths lying dead on a heap of dead at the trench's side in the cemetery of Melegnano, in that ghastly glass stereograph in our friend Dr. Bigelow's collection ? Some Austrian mother has perhaps seen her boy's features in one of those still faces. All these seemingly accidental figures are not like the shapes put in by artists to fill the blanks in their landscapes, but real breathing persons, or forms that have but lately been breathing, not found there by chance, but brought there with a purpose, fulfilling some real human errand, or at least, as in the last-mentioned picture, waiting to be buried.

Before quitting the British Islands, it would be pleasant to wander through the beautiful Vale of Avoca in Ireland, and to look on those many exquisite landscapes and old ruins and crosses which have been so admirably rendered in the stereograph. There is the Giant's Causeway, too, not in our own collection, but which our friend Mr. Waterston has transplanted with all its basaltic columns to his Museum of Art in Chester Square. Those we cannot stop to look at now, nor these many objects of historical or poetical interest which lie before us on our own table. Such are the pictures of Croyland Abbey, where they

kept that jolly drinking-horn of "Witlaf, King of the Saxons," which Longfellow has made famous; Bedd-Gelert, the grave of the faithful hound immortalized by — nay, who has immortalized --William Spencer; the stone that marks the spot where William Rufus fell by Tyrrel's shaft; the Lion's Head in Dove Dale, fit to be compared with our own Old Man of the Mountain; the "Bowder Stone," or the great boulder of Borrowdale; and many others over which we love to dream at idle moments.

When we began these notes of travel, we meant to take our fellow-voyagers over the continent of Europe, and perhaps to all the quarters of the globe. We should make a book, instead of an article, if we attempted it. Let us, instead of this, devote the remaining space to an enumeration of a few of the most interesting pictures we have met with, many of which may be easily obtained by those who will take the trouble we have taken to find them.

Views of Paris are everywhere to be had, good and cheap. The finest illuminated or transparent paper view we have ever seen is one of the Imperial Throne. There is another illuminated view, the Palace of the Senate, remarkable for the beauty with which it gives the frescoes on the cupola. We have a most interesting stereograph of the Amphitheatre of Nismes, with a bull-fight going on in its arena at the time when the picture was taken.

The contrast of the vast Roman structure, with its massive arched masonry, and the scattered assembly, which seems almost lost in the spaces once filled by the crowd of spectators who thronged to the gladiatorial shows, is one of the most striking we have ever seen. At Quimperlé is a house so like the curious old building lately removed from Dock Square in Boston, that it is commonly taken for it at the first view. The Roman tombs at Arles and the quaint streets at Troyes are the only other French pictures we shall speak of, apart from the cathedrals to be mentioned.

Of the views in Switzerland, it may be

said that the Glaciers are perfect, in the glass pictures, at least. Waterfalls are commonly poor: the water glares and looks like cotton-wool. Staubbach, with the Vale of Lauterbrunnen, is an exquisite exception. Here are a few signal specimens of Art. No. 4018, Seelisberg,unsurpassed by any glass stereograph we have ever seen, in all the qualities that make a faultless picture. No. 4119, Mont Blanc from Sta. Rosa,- the finest view of the mountain for general effect we have met with. No. 4100, Suspension-Bridge of Fribourg,― very fine, but makes one giddy to look at it. Three different views of Goldau, where the villages lie buried under these vast masses of rock, recall the terrible catastrophe of 1806, as if it had happened but yesterday.

Almost everything from Italy is interesting. The ruins of Rome, the statues of the Vatican, the great churches, all pass before us, but in a flash, as we are expressed by them on our ideal locomotive. Observe: next to snow and ice, stone is best rendered in the stereograph. Statues are given absolutely well, except where there is much foreshortening to be done, as in this of the Torso, where you see the thigh is unnaturally lengthened. See the mark on the Dying Gladiator's nose. That is where Michel Angelo mended it. There is Hawthorne's Marble Faun, (the one called of Praxiteles,) the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere, the Young Athlete with the Strigil, the Forum, the Cloaca Maxima, the Palace of the Cæsars, the bronze Marcus Aurelius, — those wonders all the world flocks to see, -the God of Light has multiplied them all for you, and you have only to give a paltry fee to his servant to own in fee-simple the best sights that earth has to show.

But look in at Pisa one moment, not for the Leaning Tower and the other familiar objects, but for the interior of the Campo Santo, with its holy earth, its innumerable monuments, and the fading frescoes on its walls, see! there are the Three Kings of Andrea Orgagna. And there hang the broken chains that once, centuries ago, crossed the Arno,— stand