From one of these sheltered apartments in a railroad car, he can pass to preengaged parlors and chambers in the hotel, with his own separate table, and all his domestic manners and peculiarities unbroken.  In fact, it is a little compact home travelling about.

Now, all this is very charming to people who know already as much about a country as they want to know; but it follows from it that a stranger might travel all through England, from one end to the other and not be on conversing terms with a person in it.  He may be at the same hotel, in the same train with people able to give him all imaginable information, yet never touch them at any practicable point of communion.  This is more especially the case if his party, as ours was, is just large enough to fill the whole apartment.

As to the comforts of the cars, it is to be said, that for the same price you can get far more comfortable riding in America.  Their first class cars are beyond all praise, but also beyond all price; their second class are comfortless, cushionless, and uninviting.  Agreeably with our theory of democratic equality, we have a general car, not so complete as the one, nor so bare as the other, where all ride together; and if the traveller in thus riding sees things that occasionally annoy him, when he remembers that the whole population, from the highest to the lowest, are accommodated here together, he will certainly see hopeful indications in the general comfort, order, and respectability which prevail; all which we talked over most patriotically together, while we were lamenting that there was not a seventh to our party, to instruct us in the localities.

Every thing upon the railroad proceeds with systematic accuracy.  There is no chance for the most careless person to commit a blunder, or make a mistake.  At the proper time the conductor marches every body into their places and locks them in, gives the word, “All right,” and away we go.  Somebody has remarked, very characteristically, that the starting word of the English is “all right,” and that of the Americans “go ahead.”

Away we go through Lancashire, wide awake, looking out on all sides for any signs of antiquity.  In being thus whirled through English scenery, I became conscious of a new understanding of the spirit and phraseology of English poetry.  There are many phrases and expressions with which we have been familiar from childhood, and which, we suppose, in a kind of indefinite way, we understand, which, after all, when we come on English ground, start into a new significance:  take, for instance, these lines from L’Allegro:—­

“Sometimes walking, not unseen,
By hedge-row elms on hillocks green.

* * * * *

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures,
While the landscape round it measures;
Russet lawns and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray;
Mountains, on whose barren breast
The laboring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and livers wide: 
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom’d high in tufted trees.”