oldest walls of this house of religious life and worship? Why, here assembled men and women said prayers and sang hymns together, and brought their infants to the font four hundred years before Elizabeth was born. From Wulfruna's time to Victoria's the angels that come listening to the mingled voices of human worshippers, have looked down through these mullioned windows upon a living mosaic of gray, golden, raven, and flaxen heads, bending low in prayer under these lofty and massive arches. Think of the self-renovating vitality of this sacred edifice. All its stony veins seem alive with the immortality of truth and faith. This great tower, looking so serene over the woods and vales, has seen "the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces," built from the same quarry with itself, melt away, and whole villages of brick and stone dissolve under the breath of time. This very town it has seen reduced to dust and rebuilt many a time; and embattled castles, with walls of boastful might, broken and mingled into haggard ruin, while its own life renews itself like an immortality. These are thoughts that an attentive mind must give scope and verge to in visiting one of these old English churches of Saxon foundation and history.
Wolverhampton has been distinguished for two centuries and more for its manufactures. Locks
