What a crowd of solemn associations gather around the mind of the intellectual visitor on first entering these ancient walls! the very silence which reigns around the vast edifice is startling, and the sound of a falling footstep seems to awaken a thousand sleeping echoes that were mute and voiceless as the surrounding tombs. We feel that we are in the presence of the mighty dead; and, as we gaze around, the deeds which throw a grandeur and a gloom over the pages of English history pass in vivid succession before the eye of the mind. The very pavement seems strewn with the ruins of crowns, sceptres, helmets, and swords, mitres and croziers, bent, crushed, dented, and broken; while, amid the dim gold and the rusted steel, the green laurels of the poet alone remain unchanged. What moving scenes have broken the lengthened shadows which those high-piled pillars throw over aisle and choir! the christenings, coronations, marriages, and funerals of departed monarchs, who have returned to the dust from whence they came. Light and darkness, summer and winter, have brightened and deepened thousands of times over the shadowy crypts in which their ashes repose--every thing grand and imposing is swept away excepting the mighty monuments, which scarcely seem the work of human hands; they rise like images of eternity, ever bending and keeping watch above their silent graves. Here, in the Pix-office, we are surrounded by Saxon architecture. How massive, plain, solid, and majestic, is this portion of the venerable pile! As it stands now, so it stood before the shores of England were startled by the sound of Norman trumpets--a monument worthy of the descendant of Alfred the Great! The beautiful Mosaic pavement that lies before the altar in the choir, was brought from Rome by the good old Abbot Ware, about the close of the reign of the third Henry--a king to whose liberality we are indebted for a great portion of the erection of the Abbey: for the completion of the whole was the work of many eventful years; and before its towers rose, as they do now, pointing to the sky, many a crowned head sunk in succession into the dark quietude of the tomb. Suns rose and set, and the mighty work grew up; and amid the trump and thunder of a thousand battles, it has stood unshaken: it is too strong for the destroying hand of man; and Time, as if in reverence, has trod lightly as he stepped over it. [Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]