Much, however, as London has changed, and constantly as it continues to change, many objects still remain, and long will continue to remain, that startle and impress the sensitive mind. Through all its wide compass, by night and day, flows and beats a turbulent, resounding tide of activity, and hundreds of trivial and vacuous persons, sordid, ignorant, and commonplace tramp to and fro amid its storied antiquities, heedless of their existence. Through such surroundings, but finding here and there a sympathetic guide or a friendly suggestion, the explorer must make his way,--lonely in the crowd, and walking like one who lives in a dream. Yet he never will drift in vain through a city like this. I went one night into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey--that part, the South Walk, which is still accessible after the gates have been closed. The stars shone down upon the blackening walls and glimmering windows of the great cathedral; the grim, mysterious arches were dimly lighted; the stony pathways, stretching away beneath the venerable building, seemed to lose themselves in caverns of darkness; not a sound was heard but the faint rustling of the grass upon the cloister green. Every stone there is the mark of a sepulchre; every breath of the night wind seemed the whisper of a gliding ghost. There, among the crowded graves, rest Anne Oldfield and Anne Bracegirdle,--in Queen Anne's reign such brilliant luminaries of the stage,--and there was buried the dust of Aaron Hill, poet and dramatist, once manager of Drury Lane, who wrote _The Fair Inconstant_ for Barton Booth, and some notably felicitous love-songs. There, too, are the relics of Susanna Maria Arne (Mrs. Theo. Cibber), Mrs. Dancer, Thomas Betterton, and Spranger Barry. Sitting upon the narrow ledge that was the monks' rest, I could touch, close at hand, the tomb of a mitred abbot, while at my feet was the great stone that covers twenty-six monks of Westminster who perished by the Plague nearly six hundred years ago. It would scarcely be believed that the doors of dwellings open upon that gloomy spot; that ladies may sometimes be seen tending flowers upon the ledges that roof those cloister walks. Yet so it is; and in such a place, at such a time, you comprehend better than before the self-centred, serious, ruminant, romantic character of the English mind,--which loves, more than anything else in the world, the privacy of august surroundings and a sombre and stately solitude. It hardly need be said that you likewise obtain here a striking sense of the power of contrast. I was again aware of this, a little later, when, seeing a dim light in St. Margaret's church near by, I entered that old temple and found the men of the choir at their rehearsal, and presently observed on the wall a brass plate which announces that Sir Walter Raleigh was buried here, in the chancel,--after being decapitated for high treason in the Palace Yard outside. Such things are the surprises of this historic capital.