164 AN OCTOBER ABROAD. 



tues are stronger. In Paris, too, those superb monu- 

 ments 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 depend- 

 ence. No doubt kings and tyrants know the value of 

 these things, and as yet they certainly have the mo- 

 nopoly of them. 



I am too good a countryman to feel much at home 

 in cities, and usually value them only as conveniences, 

 but for London I conceived quite an affection ; per- 

 haps 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 for- 

 est of brick and stone of the most stupendous dimen- 

 sions, and one traverses it in the same adventurous 

 kind of way that he does woods and mountains. The 

 maze and tangle of streets is something 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, 



