that
have but lately been breathing, not found there by chance, but brought
there with a purpose, fulfilling some real human errand, or at least, as
in the last-mentioned picture, waiting to be buried.
Before quitting the British Islands, it would be pleasant to wander
through the beautiful Vale of Avoca in Ireland, and to look on those
many exquisite landscapes and old ruins and crosses which have been so
admirably rendered in the stereograph. There is the Giant's Causeway,
too,--not in our own collection, but which our friend Mr. Waterston
has transplanted with all its basaltic columns to his Museum of Art in
Chester Square. Those we cannot stop to look at now, nor these many
objects of historical or poetical interest which lie before us on our
own table. Such are the pictures of Croyland Abbey, where they kept that
jolly drinking-horn of "Witlaf, King of the Saxons", which Longfellow
has made famous; Bedd-Gelert, the grave of the faithful hound
immortalized by--nay, who has immortalized--William Spencer; the stone
that marks the spot where William Rufus fell by Tyrrel's shaft; the
Lion's Head in Dove Dale, fit to be compared with our own Old Man of the
Mountain; the "Bowder Stone," or the great boulder of Borrowdale; and
many others over which we love to dream at idle moments.
When we began these notes of travel, we meant to take our
fellow-voyagers over the continent of Europe, and perhaps to all the
quarters of the globe. We should make a book, instead of an article, if
we attempted it. Let us, instead of this, devote the remaining space to
an enumeration of a few of the most interesting pictures we have met
with, many of which may be easily obtained by those who will take the
trouble we have taken to find them.
Views of Paris are everywhere to be had, good and cheap. The finest
illuminated or transparent paper view we have ever seen is one of the
Imperial Throne. There is another illuminated view, the Palace of the
Senate, remarkable for the beauty with which it gives the frescoes on
the cupola. We have a most interesting stereograph of the Amphitheatre
of Nismes, with a _bull-fight_ going on in its arena at the time when
the picture was taken. The contrast of the vast Roman structure, with
its massive arched masonry, and the scattered assembly, which seems
almost lost in the spaces once filled by the crowd of spectators who
thronged to the gladiatorial shows, is one of the most striking we have
ever seen.
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