I no more escaped a return to Westminster Abbey than to St. Paul's, but
I had from the first so profoundly and thoroughly naturalized myself to
the place that it was like going back to a home of my youth. It was,
indeed, the earliest home of my youthful love of the old; and if I might
advise any reader who still has his first visit to Westminster Abbey
before him, I would counsel him not to go there much past his
twenty-fourth year. If possible, let him repair to the venerable fane in
the year 1861, and choose a chill, fair day of the English December, so
short as to be red all through with a sense of the late sunrise and a
prescience of the early sunset. Then he will know better than I could
otherwise tell him how I felt in that august and beautiful place, and
how my heart rose in my throat when I first looked up in the Poets'
Corner and read the words, "Oh, rare Ben Jonson!" The good Ben was never
so constantly rare in life as he has been in death, and that I knew well
enough from having tried to read him in days when I was willing to try
reading any one. But I was meaning then to be rare every moment myself,
and out of the riches of my poetic potentiality I dowered him with a
wealth of poetry which he had not actually enjoyed; and in this generous
emotion the tears came.

I am not sensible of having been grouped with others in charge of a
verger, but a verger there must have been, and at my next visit there
must equally have been one; he only entered, rigid, authoritative,
unsparing, into my consciousness at the third or fourth visit, widely
separated by time, when he marshalled me the way that he was going with
a flock of other docile tourists. I suppose it would be possible to see
Westminster Abbey without a verger, but I do not know; and would it be
safe? I imagine he was there at my first and second visits, but that my
memory rejected him as unfit for association with fames and names made