to weather. The weather was brilliant, warm, and clear. Had it rained all the time my enthusiasm might have been dampened.
One day we consecrated to the venerable abbey, of course. No amount of description can render this threadbare to us. I gazed with as much emotion on the beautiful profile of Mary Queen of Scots as if I were the first person who had ever wept over her "strange, eventful history." Nothing is disagreeable here but the old vergers, who trooped us round like sheep, and who gave us the most familiar historical facts with great deliberateness, as if they feared we should "dilate with the wrong emotion." I was pleased to see a full-length statue of Mrs. Siddons in Westminster Abbey. Since the Romish Church denies Christian sepulture to actors, it was pleasing to see this proof of the superior liberality of her English daughter. I stopped a moment before the bust of Thackeray. He was the only one of those immortals whom I had seen, and I rejoiced as I looked upon the speaking marble that I had known and listened to that great genius.
Westminster Abbey is thoroughly Saxon; its architecture suggests a forest. Its stones seem to have been dug from primeval quarries; those dark rafters hewn from Saxon oak, smoked perhaps by druidical sacrifices. Those Gothic lines in their upward flight tell us that nature is herself a church, even as she is a tomb. Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation's prayer ever in dumb music ascending.
To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime. We gave it one day —
