Fortune gave me a good first day at the Tower of London. The sky lowered. The air was very cold. The wind blew with angry gusts. The rain fell, now and then, in a chill drizzle. The river was dark and sullen. If the spirits of the dead come back to haunt any place they surely come back to haunt that one; and this was a day for their presence. One dark ghost seemed near, at every step--the ominous shade of the lonely Duke of Gloster. The little room in which the princes are said to have been murdered, by his command, was shown, and the oratory where king Henry the Sixth is supposed to have met a violent death, and the council chamber, in which Richard--after listening, in an ambush behind the arras--denounced the wretched Hastings. The latter place is now used as an armoury; but the same ceiling covers it that echoed the bitter invective of Gloster and the rude clamour of his soldiers, when their frightened victim was plucked forth and dragged downstairs, to be beheaded on "a timber-log" in the courtyard. The Tower is a place for such deeds, and you almost wonder that they do not happen still, in its gloomy chambers. The room in which the princes were killed (if killed indeed they were) is particularly grisly in aspect. It is an inner room, small and dark. A barred window in one of its walls fronts a window on the other side of the passage by which you approach it. This is but a few feet from the floor, and perhaps the murderers paused to look through it as they went to their hellish work upon the children of king Edward. The entrance was indicated to a secret passage by which this apartment could be approached from the foot of the Tower. In one gloomy stone chamber the crown jewels are exhibited, in a large glass case. One of the royal relics is a crown of velvet and gold that was made for poor Anne Boleyn. You may pass across the courtyard and pause on the spot where that miserable woman was beheaded, and you may walk thence over the ground that her last trembling footsteps traversed, to the round tower in which, at the close, she lived. Her grave is in the chancel of the little antique church, close by. I saw the cell of Raleigh, and that direful chamber which is scrawled all over with the names and emblems of prisoners who therein suffered confinement and lingering agony, nearly always ending in death; but I saw no sadder place than Anne Boleyn's tower. It seemed in the strangest way eloquent of mute suffering. It seemed to exhale grief and to plead for love and pity. Yet--what woman ever had greater love than was lavished on her? And what woman ever trampled more royally and recklessly upon human hearts?