afoot, but nevertheless a man may easily walk the fifty-six miles from
London to Canterbury in four days. I failed because I found so much to
see by the wayside. And to begin with there was London itself, which I
was about to leave.

It was very early on an April morning when I set out from my home,
coming through London on foot and crossing the river by London Bridge.
It was there I lingered first, in the half light, as it were to say
good-bye.

I do not know what it is in London that at long last and in some quite
impersonal way clutches at the heart and receives one's eager
affection. At first, even though you be one of her children, she seems
and for how long like something fallen, calling you with the
monotonous, mighty, complaining voice of a fallen archangel,
ceaselessly through the days, the years, the centuries and the ages.
She is one of the oldest of European cities, she is one of the most
beautiful, of all capitals she is by far the most full of character:
and yet she is not easy to know or to love. Perhaps she does not
belong to us, but is something apart, something in and for herself, a
mighty and a living thing, owing us nothing and regarding us, whom
she tortures, with a sort of indifference, if not contempt.

And yet she is ours after all; she belongs to us, is more perhaps our
very likeness and self than the capital of any other people. What is
Berlin but a brutalised village, or Paris now but cosmopolis, or Rome
but a universe? She is ours, the very gate of England of my heart. For
she stands there striding the boundary of my country, the greatest of
our cities, the greatest even of our industrial cities--a negative to
all the rest. To the North she says Nay continually, for she is