512 London in 1857. 



fountains and rostra, the balustrades across the noble area, the eques- 

 trian statue of King Charles, the square itself, noiseless and deserted 

 as the fearful Upas. All mocked me with its voiceless sameness. 

 The sun was high and hot, the sky intensely blue, and the burning 

 sunshine streaming down and gilding the monuments of the departed, 

 the " whitened sepulchres," still, ghostlike, and untenanted. 



I reached the Strand. The new rows of shops and houses on the 

 north side of the thoroughfare looked just as usual. A labyrinth of 

 empty streets extended round me ; the silence of the charnel vault 

 brooded over the roofs, the spires, the colossal magnificence of 

 London ! 



The upper part of the Strand, and the new Triumphal Arch erected 

 in the place of the old and dingy Temple Bar, now rose upon the 

 sight. I increased my pace. Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, St. Paul's 

 Churchyard, Cheapside, the Poultry, Lombard Street, Fenchurch 

 Street, Thames Street, were successively passed through, and I walked 

 along the Custom House Terrace, and, reaching the stairs, began to 

 think of the desolation I had witnessed in my passage. Shops, ware- 

 houses, manufactories, public buildings, private houses, streets, lanes, 

 courts, and alleys, had shocked me with their more than deathlike 

 stillness. I was half stupified, and gazed vacantly upon the broad 

 and silvery surface of the beautiful Thames, as it rippled gently up 

 to my feet (the tide was up), and seemed to proclaim to me that it 

 was the only thing gifted with motion within the monstrous circuit of 

 our Titanean metropolis. 



I leaped into a wherry and seized the oars, anxious to drift down 

 the glittering river towards the country, and so escape the horrors 

 that reigned in the City of the Dead. Here was fresh food for wonder. 

 The tiers of shipping rose grimly before me, frowning like giants on 

 the silent waters, and seeming to taunt me with my utter helplessness 

 and insignificance, a forest of masts and I buried in the recesses. / 

 grew now frightened at the things around me. The mighty vessels, with 

 their high and jetty sides, the nets of labyrinthine cordage, the sea 

 of tracery, the squared yards, the fluttering streamers, the tiers of 

 colliers and coasters, stretching out before me, till they were lost by 

 distance and the turns of the river, the river craft of all descriptions, 

 the unwieldy steam-ships, with their stunted funnels, black hulls, and 

 scarlet paddles, these objects of life and use, ten thousand times more 

 horrid in their present motionless abandonment and lumbering useless- 

 ness, with the one wide tomb, the spectral metropolis, on each side of 

 me, with its hundred tapering spires, its sublimely-domed cathedral, its 

 towered abbey, its ocean of wavy roofs (smokeless now, alas !), its 

 splendid bridges, its wharfs, its magnificent public buildings, rose up 

 in chaos around me, and seemed each, in its varying yet uniform indi- 

 viduality, to stamp madness on my brain, and drive me from the 

 deadness encircling me to the death which had so momentarily 

 swallowed up all the living population that had made London 

 London. 



I looked up to the heavens ; there all was still, and calm, and 

 beautiful, and glorious : the sun in fervid grandeur above me ; the 

 snow-heaped clouds sailing slowly through the blue profundity of the 



