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.