Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/60

Rh three thousand people live; a fact that, as it is all I have to communicate, will, I hope, surprise you as much as it did me.

We went three times to Westminster Abbey, and spent many hours there; hours that had more sensation in them than months, I might almost say years, of ordinary life. Why, my dear C., it is worth crossing the Atlantic to enter the little door by "which we first went into the Abbey, and have your eyes light on that familiar legend, "O rare Ben Jonson!" And then to walk around and see the monuments of Shakspeare, Spenser, Milton, and of other inspired teachers. You have strange and mixed feelings. You approach nearer to than than ever before, but it is in sympathy with their mortality. You realize for the first time that they are dead; for who, of all your friends, have been so living to you as they? We escaped from our automaton guide, and walked about as if in a trance.

There is much imbodied history in the Abbey—facts recorded in stone. And there are startling curiosities of antiquity, such, for example, as a coronation-chair as old as Edward the Confessor's time, and the helmet of Henry V., and his saddle, the very saddle he rode at Agincourt I thought, as I looked at it, and felt the blood tingling in my veins, that his prophecy of being "freshly remembered," even "to the ending of the world," was in fair progress to fulfilment.