A few hours in Richmond, and somehow we feel as though the war was of yesterday. The victor may forget, but the vanquished, who have tasted the bitterness worse than death, remember; it is ever “yesterday” with the mother who mourns her dead. The passion for Virginia glows in every Virginian breast, and a myriad hearts beating as one mourn with proud regret for her noblest sons. Not Virginia alone; the generous North and faithful South unite in yielding due reverence to the indomitable Jackson and to Lee--the stainless gentleman and pure patriot. Here, in Richmond, those names are household words, and every day we hear fresh anecdotes of their lives and deaths. But the South does not waste its time in lamenting over their graves; there is no greater mistake than to imagine that it is frittering away its energies in vain regrets. The past is past, the dead are buried; and on the ruins of the old life the South is building up a new--in fact, it is recreating itself. New railways opening, great factories arising on every side, bear witness to the energy with which the South is throwing itself into the work of restoration. The reviving South of to-day bears promise of fairer fruitage, a far nobler future than could ever have been reaped from their beloved and buried past. Now that the curse of slavery, the inherited evil--not their crime, but their misfortune--has been torn out of the fair land, at the root of whose seeming prosperity it lay coiled like a canker worm--now that the blot is effaced, washed away in the life blood of the best and bravest of the North and South--their undaunted spirits are united in one grand effort to lift up their beautiful land till it shall stand in the foremost rank among many nations. No one visiting the South to-day can recognise a single feature of its ancient self, so complete is the change that has swept over the whole land, so silent the revolution that has worked in the minds of men and the arrangement of things. It is like a creature that has been dead, buried, and resurrected to a higher and nobler state of existence; in fact, looking back upon its life among the yesterdays it can scarcely recognise itself; the very atmosphere seems changed from a sultry enervating air to an invigorating breeze, affecting the spirits as well as the bodies of the people. Never was ruin so proudly met, defeat so grandly borne; there is no useless looking back, no lingering regrets over the irrevocable past--their eyes and their energies are bent on the onward march. But we must hasten to take our first view of the city of Richmond.