centuries only
served to weld them more firmly in their places. The villages were
massed together, each in a small space, instead of being dispread
loosely over a township, as in his native New England, and enduring
stone and plaster took the place of timber and shingles. But the
churches, small and fabulously ancient, affected him most. He placed his
hand on stones which had been set in place before William the Conqueror
landed in England, and this physical survival seemed to bring into his
actual presence the long succession of all the intervening ages. These
structures, still so solid and serviceable, had witnessed the passing of
the entire procession of English history; all the mighty men and events
of her career had come and gone while they remained unscathed. Under his
feet were the graves of the unknown dead; within the narrow precincts he
inhaled that strange, antique odor of mortality that made him feel as
if he were breathing the air of long-dead centuries. This apparent
evanescence of the spiritual attested by the survival of the material is
one of the most singular and impressive of sensations; it takes history
out of the realm of the mind, and brings it into sensible manifestation.
It is almost as affecting as if the very figures of departed actors of
former ages were to reappear and rub shoulders with us of today, and
cast their shadows in the contemporary sunshine.

On most of these walks in the neighborhood of Rock Ferry I was my
father's companion, but, though my legs could march beside his, my
mental-equipment could not participate in his meditations. He would
occasionally make some half-playful, imaginative remark, calculated to
help me realize the situation that was so vividly present to himself.
His thoughts, however deep, were always ready to break into playfulness
outwardly. We often walked through the village of Bebbington, whose
church had a high stone steeple, nearly to the summit of which the
ancient ivy had clambered. And as it came in view he would always say,
in a sort of recitative, perhaps reminiscent of Scott's narrative poems,
which he was at that time reading aloud to us, "There is of Bebbington
the holy peak!" To which I would as constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington
the holy spire,' father!"--being offended by his use of a word so
unmusical as peak. He would only smile and trudge onward. He was
somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to check in his son any tendency towards
mere poetical senti