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. 



LONDON. 



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. PauTa 



