This Mersey River would be a very beautiful one, if it were not so dingy
and muddy. As we are sailing up in the tender towards Liverpool, I
deplore the circumstance feelingly. "What does make this river so
muddy?"

"O," says a bystander, "don't you know that

'The quality of mercy is not strained'?"

And now we are fairly alongside the shore, and we are soon going to set
our foot on the land of Old England.

Say what we will, an American, particularly a New Englander, can never
approach the old country without a kind of thrill and pulsation of
kindred. Its history for two centuries was our history. Its literature,
laws, and language are our literature, laws, and language. Spenser,
Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, were a glorious inheritance, which we share
in common. Our very life-blood is English life-blood. It is Anglo-Saxon
vigor that is spreading our country from Atlantic to Pacific, and
leading on a new era in the world's development. America is a tall,
sightly young shoot, that has grown from the old royal oak of England;
divided from its parent root, it has shot up in new, rich soil, and
under genial, brilliant skies, and therefore takes on a new type of
growth and foliage, but the sap in it is the same.

I had an early opportunity of making acquaintance with my English
brethren; for, much to my astonishment, I found quite a crowd on the
wharf, and we walked up to our carriage through a long lane of people,
bowing, and looking very glad to see us. When I came to get into the
hack it was surrounded by more faces than I could count. They stood