I took great delight in wandering about the old town of Salisbury.  There are no such surprises in our oldest places as one finds in Chester, or Tewkesbury, or Stratford, or Salisbury, and I have no doubt in scores or hundreds of similar places which I have never visited.  The best substitute for such rambles as one can take through these mouldy boroughs (or burrows) is to be found in such towns as Salem, Newburyport, Portsmouth.  Without imagination, Shakespeare’s birthplace is but a queer old house, and Anne Hathaway’s home a tumble-down cottage.  With it, one can see the witches of Salem Village sailing out of those little square windows, which look as if they were made on purpose for them, or stroll down to Derby’s wharf and gaze at “Cleopatra’s Barge,” precursor of the yachts of the Astors and Goulds and Vanderbilts, as she comes swimming into the harbor in all her gilded glory.  But it must make a difference what the imagination has to work upon, and I do not at all wonder that Mr. Ruskin would not wish to live in a land where there are no old ruins of castles and monasteries.  Man will not live on bread only; he wants a great deal more, if he can get it,—­frosted cake as well as corn-bread; and the New World keeps the imagination on plain and scanty diet, compared to the rich traditional and historic food which furnishes the banquets of the Old World.

What memories that week in Salisbury and the excursions from it have left in my mind’s picture gallery!  The spire of the great cathedral had been with me as a frequent presence during the last fifty years of my life, and this second visit has deepened every line of the impression, as Old Mortality refreshed the inscriptions on the tombstones of the Covenanters.  I find that all these pictures which I have brought home with me to look at, with

  “that inward eye
  Which is the bliss of solitude,”

are becoming clearer and brighter as the excitement of overcrowded days and weeks gradually calms down.  I can be in those places where I passed days and nights, and became habituated to the sight of the cathedral, or of the Church of the Holy Trinity, at morning, at noon, at evening, whenever I turned my eyes in its direction.  I often close my eyelids, and startle my household by saying, “Now I am in Salisbury,” or “Now I am in Stratford.”  It is a blessed thing to be able, in the twilight of years, to illuminate the soul with such visions.  The Charles, which flows beneath my windows, which I look upon between the words of the sentence I am now writing, only turning my head as I sit at my table,—­the Charles is hardly more real to me than Shakespeare’s Avon, since I floated on its still waters, or strayed along its banks and saw the cows reflected in the smooth expanse, their legs upward, as if they were walking the skies as the flies walk the ceiling.  Salisbury Cathedral stands as substantial in my thought as our own King’s Chapel, since I slumbered by its side, and arose in the morning to find it still there, and not one of those unsubstantial fabrics built by the architect of dreams.