ioo A Walk from 



nor transpose from their first order within those ever- 

 lasting staves and bars ! 



If the spirit's faith be allowed such wide confidences 

 as these ; if it may carry up into the invisible and 

 infinite so many precious relics from the wreck of time, 

 so many human circumstances and associations, why 

 may it not take with it, to hang up in its heaven, 

 photographs of those earthly localities rendered immor- 

 tal here by the lives of good and great men ? Such a 

 life is a sun, and it casts a disk of light upon the very 

 earth on which it shines ; not that flashy circle which 

 the lens of the microscope casts upon the opposite wall, 

 to show how scarcely visible mites may be magni- 

 fied ; but a soft and steady illumination that does not 

 dim under the beating storms and bleaching dews of 

 centuries, but grows brighter and brighter, as if the 

 seed-rays that made it first multiplied themselves from 

 year to year. The earth becomes more and more thickly 

 dotted with these permanent disks of light, and each is 

 visited by pilgrims, who go and stand with reverence 

 and admiration within the cheering circle. Shakespeare's 

 thought-life threw out a brilliant illumination, of wide 

 circumference, at Stratford-upon-Avon, and no locality 

 in England bears a biograph more venerated than the 

 birth-place of the great poet. His thought-life was a 

 sun that never will set as long as this above us shines. 



