tive
element,--about him, and him only, are the halos and dawns of immortal
youth; and his speech, though with many babyish or barbarous fancies, many
melancholies and vices of the blood compounded, carries nevertheless some
refrain of divine hilarity, that beguiles men of their sordidness, their
sullenness, and low cares, they know not how nor why.

* * * * *

PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON.

We set out at a little past eleven, and made our first stage to
Manchester. We were by this time sufficiently Anglicized to reckon the
morning a bright and sunny one; although the May sunshine was mingled with
water, as it were, and distempered with a very bitter east-wind.

Lancashire is a dreary county, (all, at least, except its hilly portions,)
and I have never passed through it without wishing myself anywhere but in
that particular spot where I then happened to be. A few places along our
route were historically interesting; as, for example, Bolton, which was
the scene of many remarkable events in the Parliamentary War, and in the
market-square of which one of the Earls of Derby was beheaded. We saw,
along the way-side, the never-failing green fields, hedges, and other
monotonous features of an ordinary English landscape. There were little
factory villages, too, or larger towns, with their tall chimneys, and
their pennons of black smoke, their uglinesses of brick-work, and their
heaps of refuse matter from the furnace, which seems to be the only kind
of stuff which Nature cannot take back to herself and resolve into the
elements, when man has thrown it aside. These hillocks of waste and effete
mineral always disfigure the neighborhood of ironmongering towns, and,
even after a considerable antiquity, are hardly made decent with a little
grass.

At a quarter to two we left Manchester by the Sheffield and Lincoln
Railway. The scenery grew rather better than that through which we had
hitherto passed, though still by no means very striking; for (except in
the show-districts, such as the Lake country, or Derbyshire) English
scenery is not particularly well worth looking at, considered as a
spectacle or a picture. It has a real, homely charm of its own, no doubt;
and the rich verdure, and the thorough finish added by human, art, are
perhaps as attractive to an American eye as any stronger feature could be.
Our journey, however, between Manchester and Sheffield was not through a
rich tract of coun