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[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE BULLER, NEW ZEALAND.]
IN 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world: everywhere I was in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always one.
The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my fellow and my guide--a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of strange new lands--is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race, already girding the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, eventually to overspread.
In America, the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they are run into an English mould: Alfred's laws and Chaucer's tongue are theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more than found plantations of her own--that she has imposed her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the world.
Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds: the development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small islands are by courtesy styled "Great," America, Australia, India, must form a Greater Britain.
76 SLOANE STREET, S. W. 1_st November_, 1868.
FRIDAY'S STATION--VALLEY OF LAKE TAHOE 176
TEAMING UP THE GRADE AT SLIPPERY FORD, IN THE SIERRA 178
VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER--THE PLACE WHERE GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND 180
THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY } 228
THE OLD AND THE NEW: BUSH SCENERY--COLLINS STREET EAST, MELBOURNE 24
From the bows of the steamer _Saratoga_, on the 20th June, 1866, I caught sight of the low works of Fort Monroe, as, threading her way between the sand-banks of Capes Charles and Henry, the ship pressed on, under sail and steam, to enter Chesapeake Bay.