ss the ocean to see it. It is here, literally to every
dimple in the back of the falling hand, and every crinkle of the
vermiculated stone-work. What a curious pleasure it is to puzzle out the
inscriptions on the monuments in the background!--for the beauty of your
photograph is, that you may work out minute derails with the microscope,
just as you can with the telescope in a distant landscape in Nature.
There is a lady, for instance, leaning upon an urn,--suggestive, a
little, of Morgiana and the forty thieves. Above is a medallion of one
wearing a full periwig. Now for a half-inch lens to make out the specks
that seem to be letters. "Erected to the Memory of William Pulteney,
Earl of Bath, by his Brother"--That will do,--the inscription operates
as a cold bath to enthusiasm. But here is our own personal namesake,
the once famous Rear Admiral of the White, whose biography we can find
nowhere except in the "Gentleman's Magazine," where he divides the glory
of the capture of Quebec with General Wolfe. A handsome young man with
hyacinthine locks, his arms bare and one hand resting on a cannon. We
remember thinking our namesake's statue one of the most graceful in the
Abbey, and have always fallen back on the memory of that and of Dryden's
Achates of the "Annus Mirabilis," as trophies of the family.

Enough of these marbles; there is no end to them; the walls and floor of
the great, many-arched, thousand-pillared, sky-lifted cavern are crusted
all over with them, like stalactites and stalagmites. The vast temple is
alive with the images of the dead. Kings and queens, nobles, statesmen,
soldiers, admirals, the great men whose deeds we all know, the great
writers whose words are in all our memories, the brave and the beautiful
whose fame has shrunk into their epitaphs, are all around us. What is
the cry for alms that meets us at the door of the church to the mute
petition of these marble beggars, who ask to warm their cold memories
for a moment in our living hearts? Look up at the mighty arches
overhead, borne up on tall clustered columns,--as if that avenue of
Royal Palms we remember in the West India Islands (photograph) had been
spirited over seas and turned into stone. Make your obeisance to the
august shape of Sir Isaac Newton, reclining like a weary swain in the
niche at the side of the gorgeous screen. Pass through Henry VII.'s
Chapel, a temple cut like a cameo. Look at the shining oaken stalls of
the knights. See the