AN OCTOBER ABROAD. 



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 

 certainly have the monopoly 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 ; 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 stupendous dimensions, and one 

 traverses ft 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, but saw through the rifts in the smoke only a 

 waste — literally a waste of red tiles and chimneypots. 

 The confusion and desolation were complete. 



