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A DREAM IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 
** There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
*« Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 
Every, one who has made the living world the subject of deep and 
careful study, must; have remarked that its apparent. size and felt im- 
portance diminish in proportion to the length of time for which it is 
contemplated. We come abroad in the morning of life, and all those 
elements of nature which seem fraught with enjoyment shew themselves 
of giant lineaments ; but, as life wears on, they recede from us, and di- 
minish with a wonderful rapidity of perspective, till, ere the days of our 
sorrow be half numbered, they fade upon the dim horizon, and we cease 
to regard them as being of any consequence in themselves, or likely to 
produce any comfort to us. 
He is therefore a wise man who occasionally steals away from them ; 
because, after every period of absence and abstraction, some portion at 
least of their size and their importance returns. And this absence and 
this abstraction—this renovation of the powers of man, and recreating, 
as if were, of the physical object of those powers,—is no where more suc- 
cessfully found than in the mansions of the dead. Even in this vast 
metropolis, the crowd of busy beings that throng around us have their 
threescore-and-ten years circumscribed within the same century as we; 
and while we turn to them, they give us no glance back at the past of 
human history, and very little hope for satisfaction with regard to. the 
future. But when we go into one of those localities where the bones of 
a thousand generations have collected together, we hold converse with 
ages, and the volume of history is condensed into a single thought. 
Under a momentary sickness at mankind, and with feelings somewhat 
analogous to those here mentioned, I entered Westminster Abbey ; 
and my heart sunk as I surveyed the natural Golgotha—the mingled 
mass of monuments and mockery. I could not. pause to estimate 
the merits of sculpture, or to notice the accordance to those they 
are intended to commemorate. As little did I care for the truth or 
taste, or the want of truth or taste, of the monumental inscriptions, 
A cemetery of the great, whether it is meant as the burying-place of 
their bones or their fame, has in it, especially when combined with the 
national pile of antique and gloomy architecture, something far more 
sublime than statues, and more eloquent than epitaphs; and he who 
cannot be affected by the voice of immortality, which in such a place 
triumphs over the grave, has little chance of being affected by the exter- 
nal and empty garniture. 
The sun was near the horizon. His rays, dimmed by the thick atmo- 
sphere of the city, streamed softened through the stained glass of the 
great west, window in colours so gloomy and so glorious, that they went 
into my very soul; and as the glosses that collect in the western cloud 
are the harbingers of the silence and darkness of night, so these glories, 
at such at a time, in such a place, and under such a temper of mind, 
seemed to be harbingers of the more still silence and more gloomy dark- 
ness of death. / 
I sat down on a part of the tomb of Edward. I gazed around me. 
The awe was so overpowering, that I could neither meditate nor move. 
A few lounging visitants flitted past me—each making the trifling com- 
mentary of an idler, or the pecianie one of an artist, I was an isolated 
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