144 WINTEE 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- 

 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, — 



