here! What a riving and a ruin do
those letters record! Still they brought in their severed hands a
common homage-gift to the memory of the Writer of Abbotsford. If
they represented the dissolution of a great political fabric, in
which they once gloried with equal pride, they meant union here--a
oneness indissoluble in admiration for a great genius whose memory
can no more be localised to a nation than the interest of his works.

American names, both of the North and South, may be found on almost
every page of the register. I wrote mine next to that of a
gentleman from Worcester, Mass., my old place of residence, who only
left an hour before my arrival. Abbotsford and Stratford-upon-Avon
are points to which our countrymen converge in their travels in this
country; and you will find more of their signatures in the registry
of these two haloed homesteads of genius than anywhere else in
Europe.

The valley of the Tweed in this section is all an artist would
delight in as a surrounding of such histories. The hills are lofty,
declining into gorges or dells at different angles with the river,
which they wall in precipitously with their wooded sides in many
places. They are mostly cultivated to the top, and now in harvest
many of them were crowned with stooked sheaves of wheat, each
looking in the distance like Nature with her golden curls done up in
paper, dressing for the harvest-home of the season. Some of them
wore belts and gores of turnip foliage of different nuances of green
luxuriance, combining with every conceivable shade and alternation
of vegetable coloring. Indeed, as already intimated, the view from
the eminence almost overhanging the little sequestered peninsula on
which Old Melrose stood twelve centuries ago, is indescribably
beautiful, and well worth a long journey to see, disconnected from
its historical associations. The Eildon Hills towering up heather-
crowned to the height of over 1,300 feet above the level of the sea
right out of the sheen of barley fields, as from a sea of silver,
form one of the salient features of this glorious landscape. This
is an interesting peculiarity of Scotch scenery;--civilization
sapping the barbarism of the wilderness; wheat-fields mordant biting
in upon peaty moorlands, or climbing to the tops of cold, bald
mountains, shearing off their thorny locks of heather and covering
them with the well-dressed chevelure of yellow grain. Where the
farmer's horse cannot c