ke our drive to
Stratford-on-Avon. As yet this shrine of pilgrims stands a little aloof
from the bustle of modern progress, and railroad cars do not run
whistling and whisking with brisk officiousness by the old church and
the fanciful banks of the Avon.

The country that we were to pass over was more peculiarly old English;
that phase of old English which is destined soon to pass away, under the
restless regenerating force of modern progress.

Our ride along was a singular commixture of an upper and under current
of thought. Deep down in our hearts we were going back to English days;
the cumbrous, quaint, queer, old, picturesque times; the dim, haunted
times between cock-crowing and morning; those hours of national
childhood, when popular ideas had the confiding credulity, the poetic
vivacity, and versatile life, which distinguish children from grown
people.

No one can fail to feel, in reading any of the plays of Shakspeare, that
he was born in an age of credulity and marvels, and that the materials
out of which his mind was woven were dyed in the grain, in the haunted
springs of tradition. It would have been as absolutely impossible for
even himself, had he been born in the daylight of this century, to have
built those quaint, Gothic structures of imagination, and tinted them
with their peculiar coloring of marvellousness and mystery, as for a
modern artist to originate and execute the weird designs of an ancient
cathedral. Both Gothic architecture and this perfection of Gothic poetry
were the springing and efflorescence of that age, impossible to grow
again. They were the forest primeval; other trees may spring in their
room, trees as mighty and as fair, but not such trees.

So, as we rode along, our speculations and thoughts in the under current
were back in the old world of tradition. While, on the other hand, for
the upper current, we were keeping up a brisk conversation on the peace
question, on the abolition of slavery, on the possibility of ignoring
slave-grown produce, on Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, and, in fact, on all
the most wide-awake topics of the present day.

One little incident occurred upon the road. As we were passing by a
quaint old mansion, which stood back from the road, surrounded by a deep
court, Mr. S. said to me, "There is a friend here who would like to see
thee, if thou hast no objections," and went on to inform me that she was
an aged woman, who had taken a deep interest in the abolit