many of its inhabitants, I could not feel myself a stranger there.  It was delightful to be among them.  There was a genial awe, mingled with a sense of kind and friendly presences about me; and I was glad, moreover, at finding so many of them there together in fit companionship, mutually recognized and duly honored, all reconciled now, whatever distant generations, whatever personal hostility or other miserable impediment, had divided them far asunder while they lived.  I have never felt a similar interest in any other tombstones, nor have I ever been deeply moved by the imaginary presence of other famous dead people.  A poet’s ghost is the only one that survives for his fellow-mortals, after his bones are in the dust,—­and he not ghostly, but cherishing many hearts with his own warmth in the chillest atmosphere of life.  What other fame is worth aspiring for?  Or, let me speak it more boldly, what other long-enduring fame can exist?  We neither remember nor care anything for the past, except as the poet has made it intelligibly noble and sublime to our comprehension.  The shades of the mighty have no substance; they flit ineffectually about the darkened stage where they performed their momentary parts, save when the poet has thrown his own creative soul into them, and imparted a more vivid life than ever they were able to manifest to mankind while they dwelt in the body.  And therefore—­though he cunningly disguises himself in their armor, their robes of state, or kingly purple—­it is not the statesman, the warrior, or the monarch that survives, but the despised poet, whom they may have fed with their crumbs, and to whom they owe all that they now are or have,—­a name!

In the foregoing paragraph I seem to have been betrayed into a flight above or beyond the customary level that best agrees with me; but it represents fairly enough the emotions with which I passed from Poets’ Corner into the chapels, which contain the sepulchres of kings and great people.  They are magnificent even now, and must have been inconceivably so when the marble slabs and pillars wore their new polish, and the statues retained the brilliant colors with which they were originally painted, and the shrines their rich gilding, of which the sunlight still shows a glimmer or a streak, though the sunbeam itself looks tarnished with antique dust.  Yet this recondite portion of the Abbey presents few memorials of personages whom we care to remember.  The shrine of Edward the Confessor has a certain interest, because it was so long held in religious reverence, and because the very dust that settled upon it was formerly worth gold.  The helmet and war-saddle of Henry V., worn at Agincourt, and now suspended above his tomb, are memorable objects, but more for Shakspeare’s sake than the victor’s own.  Rank has been the general passport to admission here.  Noble and regal dust is as cheap as dirt under the pavement.  I am glad to recollect, indeed, (and it is too characteristic