great! Issuing from a small door in one of the aisles of the abbey, we entered a green and peaceful meadow, to which the deepening twilight gave a grave and rich effect, heightened not a little by the shadows of the abbey towers, and by the croaking of rooks and daws among the buttresses and pinnacles. Here was the fatal field where the red-rose was smothered forever in red blood. “Lance to lance, and horse to horse”—here its fated champions struck the last blow for Margaret and her son. Here the young prince himself asserted, face to face with usurping York, the rights which his fathers had not less usurped from the fallen Plantagenet; and here, for his boldness and for his fatal royalty, he fell beneath the rapier, the last blood of Lancastrian majesty spouting from his many wounds. Can it be, so green a field was ever so crimson? It was impossible to conjure up the scenes of a period so long gone by; and yet not less impossible to stand on such a field, without some communion with the spirit of departed ages. With a worthy clergyman of Tewksbury, we finally quenched our enthusiasm in a cup of tea, and buried the swelling thoughts of Margaret’s wrongs, under the juicy morsels of a mutton-chop. As we sat at our repast, I observed that our reverend entertainer had “a river at his garden’s-end.” “Yes,” was his reply—“the Avon!” I had supposed it the Severn, of course; but when he thus reminded us of its noble confluent, after our historical communion with Shakspeare in the battle-field, all my enthusiasm returned again, and, in spite of tea and mutton-chop, I felt a thrill to find myself so near the river of the immortal Swan of Stratford. Here, indeed, it finds its fitting union with the larger waters, and runs with Severn to the sea. But now, it seemed to me fragrant and vocal with a spirit caught from the banks of Stratford churchyard, and its murmurs continually repeated the lines— “Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, That stabbed me in the field, by Tewksbury.”