It is this quality of the imagination which gives old countries their superior attractions when compared with new soils. At the sight of battle-fields, religious houses, cathedrals, castles, either in ruins or otherwise, we are pleased in calling up a crowd of shadows from the dust, and finding a sort of mysterious companionship with them during our passing reveries. Campbell says very well, that distance lends enchantment to the view, and it is generally true of the human mind that it regards the past with a feeling of tenderness—a disposition to make the best of it. There is a certain charm in Time, whom we regard as the dominator of us all; and the ruins or remnants of any thing speak an impressive warning of our own evanescent fate. That belief in the good old times is an instinct too strong for the philosophy of most of us. We have a thousand proofs that they were rude, bad, ignorant times. But the poetry of our nature will not be reasoned with, and we believe with the bard— Not rough or barren are the winding ways Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers. Any thing old or historic is appreciated in proportion to the scope it gives to the imagination—to point a moral or adorn a tale. We gaze on the wild hill, vale, stream or forest of a new country, with none of those feelings which fill us in beholding similar objects in an old land. The former may be as fair or fairer to see; but, as “A primrose by the river’s brim, A yellow primrose was to him.” of whom Wordsworth speaks, so the latter is a stream, a forest, a hill—nothing more. The nameless savages had the place from the beginning, and the solitude. The other is a tradition, a romance, a memory. In the valley is the legendary well, and the fairy ring; by the stream is the fortalice of the feudal period, or the abbey dwindled to a few ivied walls and the oriel, on the site of a bloody battle where a king fell fighting, a thousand years ago; and, on the slope of the hill stand the Druid stones, in a circle, set there, certainly, in the ancient time of the giants, who descended from Thor and Lived in the oldé days of King Artour. As Webster, the old English dramatist, says: We love these ancient ruins; We never tread upon them, but we set Our foot upon some reverend history.