As the coach began to draw near Stratford, I found myself greatly excited; and every object began to assume a sort of conscious connection with immortal genius. The very road,—but much more the trees,—and even more, those features of the landscape which might be supposed unchanged by the lapse of centuries, seemed instinct with their past communion with a great creative mind. His spell was on them. He had once been familiar with these scenes. He had gathered many an image, many a thought, and, I doubt not, many a refreshing hope, from intercourse with their spring and summer beauties; and they had been not less instructive to him, perhaps, in the season of the sere-leaf, or in that of the wintry wind. Yonder was Charlecote—beyond the Avon: its park still stretching thro’ the vale, and hiding the old historic hall. But the thought of that juvenile deer-stalking, gave speaking life to even the distant scene. There is some sensitive principle in our nature, to which such associations so powerfully appeal, that nothing is more real, for a time, than the communion we hold with departed greatness, through the medium of objects with which it was once conversant. This reality I never felt so strongly as now. At last we came in sight of that “star-ypointing pyramid”—the spire of Stratford. The gentle tumult of feelings with which it ruffled my inmost nature, for a moment, and the calm enjoyment that succeeded, were enough to pay me for crossing the Atlantic. I was duly set down at the Red Horse Inn, and ushered into the trim little parlour, and even into the elbow-chair, of which I had read, aforetime, in the pages of Geoffrey Crayon. Mine host readily recognizes an American, and never fails to produce, on such an occasion, the “sceptre” of the said Geoffrey, wherewith he once poked the coals, in the smoking grate of said parlour, and, for a tranquil moment, was “monarch of all he surveyed.” Indeed, if Shakspeare reigns in Stratford, it must be allowed that the Red Horse is, nevertheless, the principality of Crayon, and that it is rapidly rising into a formidable rivalship of New Place, and the Guildhall, on the strength of Crayon’s reputation, to say nothing of the landlord’s ale. In short, no visitor to Stratford has ever left there such a lasting impression of his footsteps, as our own delightful Irving: and it was pleasant, indeed, thus, at the very threshold of my visit, to find, even in the broad glare of Shakspeare’s glory, the star of our countryman revolving steadily in its own peculiar orbit, and shining as no mean satellite of that great central sun of Anglo-Saxon literature.