therefore, like wise and noble heirs, not to despise and
squander, but to treasure and to use that inheritance, and the
accumulated labours of the mighty dead.

I saw this, I say, at Chester. And therefore I was not surprised to find
the pleasant experience repeated, and to even a higher degree, at
Westminster. A pleasant experience, I say. I know few more agreeable
occupations than showing a party of Americans round our own great Abbey;
and sentimentalising, if you will, in sympathy with them, over England's
Pantheon.

I pause to confess once more that it is almost an impertinence in me to
pay you such a compliment. You have a right to answer me--How could it
be otherwise?--Are we not educated people? Has not our taste been
trained by native authors, who were at least civilised enough to value
the great past, without the need of any European crossing the seas to
tell us of its wealth?

If you reprove me thus, I can but say that the reproof is just, and will
remain just, as long as your poets are what they are; and as long, above
all, as you reverence as much in America as we do in England, the poetry
of Mr. Longfellow. He has not, if I recollect aright, ever employed his
muse in commemorating our great Abbey; but that muse is instinct with all
those lofty and yet tender emotions which the sight of that great Abbey
should call out. He knows, as few know on our side of the wide water,
the effect, chastening and yet ennobling, of such architecture,
consecrated by such associations. He has not only perceived and drank in
all that is purest and noblest in the now sleeping last ten centuries:
but he has combined it, again and again, with that which is purest and
noblest in the waking and yearning present; and combined it organically
and livingly, as leaf and stem combines with flower and fruit. Yes; as
long as the poet who could write both the _Belfry of Bruges_ and _The
Village Blacksmith_ is read among you, there is no need for me to bid you
reverence the past; and little need, I trust, for me to tell those whom I
leave at home to reverence the present. For it is a fact--of which some
Americans may not be as well aware as they should be--that your exquisite
poet has exercised an influence in Britain it may be as great as, and
certainly more varied than, that which he has exercised in his native
land. With us--as, I presume, with you--he has penetrated into thousands
of Puritan homes, and awakened tens of thous