art of our communion for many a social hour, with friends long
parted from earth.

The views of Scotland, which lay on my mother's table, even while I was
a little child, and in poring over which I spent so many happy, dreamy
hours,--the Scotch ballads, which were the delight of our evening
fireside, and which seemed almost to melt the soul out of me, before I
was old enough to understand their words,--the songs of Burns, which had
been a household treasure among us,--the enchantments of Scott,--all
these dimly returned upon me. It was the result of them all which I felt
in nerve and brain.

And, by the by, that puts me in mind of one thing; and that is, how much
of our pleasure in literature results from its reflection on us from,
other minds. As we advance in life, the literature which has charmed us
in the circle of our friends becomes endeared to us from the reflected
remembrance of them, of their individualities, their opinions, and their
sympathies, so that our memory of it is a many-colored cord, drawn from
many minds.

So in coming near to Scotland, I seemed to feel not only my own
individuality, but all that my friends would have felt, had they been
with me. For sometimes we seem to be encompassed, as by a cloud, with a
sense of the sympathy of the absent and the dead.

We left Liverpool with hearts a little tremulous and excited by the
vibration of an atmosphere of universal sympathy and kindness. We found
ourselves, at length, shut from the warm adieus of our friends, in a
snug compartment of the railroad car. The English cars are models of
comfort and good keeping. There are six seats in a compartment,
luxuriously cushioned and nicely carpeted, and six was exactly the
number of our party. Nevertheless, so obstinate is custom that we
averred at first that we preferred our American cars, deficient as they
are in many points of neatness and luxury, because they are so much more
social.

"Dear me," said Mr. S., "six Yankees shut up in a car together! Not one
Englishman to tell us any thing about the country! Just like the six old
ladies that made their living by taking tea at each other's houses."

But that is the way here in England: every arrangement in travelling is
designed to maintain that privacy and reserve which is the dearest and
most sacred part of an Englishman's nature. Things are so arranged here
that, if a man pleases, he can travel all through England with his
family, and keep the circle an