hevelure_ of leaves; the Auld Brig o' Doon (No.
4),--a daring arch that leaps the sweet stream at a bound, more than
half clad in a mantle of ivy, which has crept with its larva-like
feet beyond the key-stone; the Twa Brigs of Ayr, with the beautiful
reflections in the stream that shines under their eyebrow-arches; and
poor little Alloway Kirk, with its fallen roof and high gables. Lift
your hand to your eyes and draw a long breath,--for what words would
come so near to us as these pictured, nay, real, memories of the dead
poet who made a nation of a province, and the hearts of mankind its
tributaries?

And so we pass to many-towered and turreted and pinnacled Abbotsford,
and to large-windowed Melrose, and to peaceful Dryburgh, where, under a
plain bevelled slab, lies the great Romancer whom Scotland holds only
second in her affections to her great poet. Here in the foreground of
the Melrose Abbey view (436) is a gravestone which looks as if it might
be deciphered with a lens. Let us draw out this inscription from the
black archives of oblivion. Here it is:

In Memory of
Francis Cornel, late
Labourer in Greenwell,
Who died 11th July, 1827,
aged 89 years. Also
Margaret Betty, his
Spouse, who died 2'd Dec'r,
1831, aged 89 years.

This is one charm, as we have said over and over, of the truth-telling
photograph. We who write in great magazines of course float off from the
wreck of our century, on our life-preserving articles, to immortality.
What a delight it is to snatch at the unknown head that shows for an
instant through the wave, and drag it out to personal recognition and
a share in our own sempiternal buoyancy! Go and be photographed on the
edge of Niagara, O unknown aspirant for human remembrance! Do not throw
yourself, O traveller, into Etna, like Empedocles, but be taken by the
camera standing on the edge of the crater! Who is that lady in the
carriage at the door of Burns's cottage? Who is that gentleman in the
shiny hat on the sidewalk in front of the Shakspeare house? Who are
those two fair youths lying dead on a heap of dead at the trench's side
in the cemetery of Melegnano, in that ghastly glass stereograph in our
friend Dr. Bigelow's collection? Some Austrian mother has perhaps seen
her boy's features in one of those still faces. All these seemingly
accidental figures are not like the shapes put in by artists to fill the
blanks in their landscapes, but real breathing persons, or forms