144 WINTER SUNSHINE 



superb monuments over the Seine, I think they 

 alone ought to inspire the citizens with a love of 

 permanence, and help hold them to stricter notions 

 of law and dependence. No doubt kings and tyrants 

 know the value of these things, and as yet they cer 

 tainly have the monopoly of them. 



I am too good a countryman to feel much at home 

 in cities, and usually value them only as conven 

 iences, but for London I conceived quite an affec c 

 tion; perhaps because it is so much like a natural 

 formation itself, and strikes less loudly, or perhaps 

 sharply, upon the senses than our great cities do. 

 It is a forest of brick and stone of the most stupen 

 dous dimensions, and one traverses it in the same 

 adventurous kind of way that he does woods and 

 mountains. The maze and tangle of streets is some 

 thing fearful, and any generalization of them a step 

 not to be hastily taken. My experience heretofore 

 had been that cities generally were fractions that 

 could be greatly reduced, but London I found I 

 could not simplify, and every morning for weeks, 

 when I came out of my hotel, it was a question 

 whether my course lay in this direction or in 

 squarely the opposite. It has no unit of structure, 

 but is a vast aggregation of streets and houses, or in 

 fact of towns and cities, which have to be mastered 

 in detail. I tried the third or fourth day to get a 

 bird's-eye view from the top of St. Paul's, but saw 

 through the rifts in the smoke only a waste, 



