has learned to love as a friend; by some long withdrawing arm of the sea, sublimely guarded, where it opens to the ocean, by its magnificent portals of rock; by some wild range of precipitous coast, that rears high its ivy-bound pinnacles, and where the green wave ever rises and falls along dim resounding caverns; by some lonely glen, with its old pine forests hanging dark on the slopes, and its deep-brown river roaring over linn and shallow in its headlong course to the sea. Who could fight for a country without features,—that one would scarce be sure of finding out on one's return from the battle, without the assistance of the mile-stones?
As I looked on either hand from the ancient ramparts, now down along the antique lanes and streets of the town, now over the broad level fields beyond, I was amused to think how entirely all my more vivid associations with York—town and country—had been derived from works of fiction. True, it was curious enough to remember, as a historical fact, that Christianity had been preached here to the pagan Saxons in the earlier years of the Heptarchy, by missionaries from Iona. And there are not a few other picturesque incidents, that, frosted over with the romance of history, glimmer with a sort of phosphoric radiance in the records of the place,—from the times when King Edwyn of the Northumbrians demolished the heathen temple that stood where the cathedral now stands, and erected in its room the wooden oratory in which he was baptized, down to the times when little crooked Leslie broke over the city walls at the head of his Covenanters, and held them against the monarch, in the name of the king. But the historical facts have vastly less of the vividness of truth about them than the facts of the makers. It was in this city of York that the famous Robinson Crusoe was born; and here, in this city of York, did Jeanie Deans rest her for a day, on her London
