is is the lot of our
restless countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend always towards
"fresh woods and pastures new." Rather than such monotony of sluggish
ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields,
listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray
Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may come,--change of
place, social customs, political institutions, modes of
worship,--trusting, that, if all present things shall vanish, they will
but make room for better systems, and for a higher type of man to clothe
his life in them, and to fling them off in turn.

Nevertheless, while an American willingly accepts growth and change as
the law of his own national and private existence, he has a singular
tenderness for the stone-incrusted institutions of the mother-country.
The reason may be (though I should prefer a more generous explanation)
that he recognizes the tendency of these hardened forms to stiffen her
joints and fetter her ankles, in the race and rivalry of improvement. I
hated to see so much as a twig of ivy wrenched away from an old wall in
England. Yet change is at work, even in such a village as Whitnash. At a
subsequent visit, looking more critically at the irregular circle of
dwellings that surround the yew-tree and confront the church, I
perceived that some of the houses must have been built within no long
time, although the thatch, the quaint gables, and the old oaken
framework of the others diffused an air of antiquity over the whole
assemblage. The church itself was undergoing repair and restoration,
which is but another name for change. Masons were making patchwork on
the front of the tower, and were sawing a slab of stone and piling up
bricks to strengthen the side-wall, or enlarge the ancient edifice by an
additional aisle. Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the
church-yard, long and broad, and fifteen feet deep, two-thirds of which
profundity were discolored by human decay and mixed up with crumbly
bones. What this excavation was intended for I could nowise imagine,
unless it were the very pit in which Longfellow bids the "Dead Past bury
its Dead," and Whitnash, of all places in the world, were going to avail
itself of our poet's suggestion. If so, it must needs be confessed that
many picturesque and delightful things would be thrown into the hole,
and covered out of sight forever.

The article which I am writing has taken its own course, an