On signing my name in the register, I was affected at a coincidence which conveyed a tribute of respect to the memory of the great author of striking significance, while it recorded the painful catastrophe which has broken over upon the American Republic.  It was a sad sight to me to see the profane and suicidal antagonisms which have rent it in twain brought to the shrine of this great memory and graven upon its sacred tablet as it were with the murdering dagger’s point.  New and bad initials!  The father and patriot Washington would have wept tears of blood to have read them here,—­to have read them anywhere, bearing such deplorable meaning.  They were U.S.A. and C.S.A., as it were chasing each other up and down the pages of the visitors’ register.  Sad, sad was the sight—­ sadder, in a certain sense, than the smoke-wreaths of the Tuscarora and Alabama ploughing the broad ocean with their keels.  U.S.A. and C.S.A.!  What initials for Americans to write, with the precious memories of a common history and a common weal still held to their hearts—­to write here or anywhere!  What a riving and a ruin do those letters record!  Still they brought in their severed hands a common homage-gift to the memory of the Writer of Abbotsford.  If they represented the dissolution of a great political fabric, in which they once gloried with equal pride, they meant union here—­a oneness indissoluble in admiration for a great genius whose memory can no more be localised to a nation than the interest of his works.

American names, both of the North and South, may be found on almost every page of the register.  I wrote mine next to that of a gentleman from Worcester, Mass., my old place of residence, who only left an hour before my arrival.  Abbotsford and Stratford-upon-Avon are points to which our countrymen converge in their travels in this country; and you will find more of their signatures in the registry of these two haloed homesteads of genius than anywhere else in Europe.

The valley of the Tweed in this section is all an artist would delight in as a surrounding of such histories.  The hills are lofty, declining into gorges or dells at different angles with the river, which they wall in precipitously with their wooded sides in many places.  They are mostly cultivated to the top, and now in harvest many of them were crowned with stooked sheaves of wheat, each looking in the distance like Nature with her golden curls done up in paper, dressing for the harvest-home of the season.  Some of them wore belts and gores of turnip foliage of different nuances of green luxuriance, combining with every conceivable shade and alternation of vegetable coloring.  Indeed, as already intimated, the view from the eminence almost overhanging the little sequestered peninsula on which Old Melrose stood twelve centuries ago, is indescribably beautiful, and well worth a long journey to see, disconnected from its historical associations.  The Eildon Hills towering up heather-crowned to