read and who have travelled, in which one is overwhelmed by the sanctity
of a place on which men have done this or that a long, long time ago.

Here it is that the gentle supports which have been framed for human
life by that power which launched it come in and help a man. Time does
not remain, but space does, and though we cannot seize the Past
physically we can stand physically upon the site, and we can have (if I
may so express myself) a physical communion with the Past by occupying
that very spot which the past greatness of man or of event has occupied.

It was but the other day that, with an American friend at my side, I
stood looking at the little brass plate which says that here Charles
Stuart faced (he not only faced, but he refused) the authority of his
judges. I know not by what delicate mechanism of the soul that record
may seem at one moment a sort of tourist thing, to be neglected or
despised, and at another moment a portent. But I will confess that all
of a sudden, pointing out this very well-known record upon the brass let
into the stone in Westminster Hall, I suddenly felt the presence of the
thing. Here all that business was done: they were alive; they were in
the Present as we are. Here sat that tender-faced, courageous man, with
his pointed beard and his luminous eyes; here he was a living man
holding his walking-stick with the great jewel in the handle of it; here
was spoken in the very tones of his voice (and how a human voice
perishes!--how we forget the accents of the most loved and the most
familiar voices within a few days of their disappearance!); here the
small gestures, and all the things that make up a personality, marked
out Charles Stuart. When the soul is seized with such sudden and
positive conviction of the substantial past it is overwhelmed; and
Europe is full of such ghosts.