spices lingering between its warehouses, with their far-famed wine-
cellars--down through the interesting group of West India Docks,
the fine docks at Blackwall, on past the Galleons Reach entrance of
the Victoria and Albert Docks, right down to the vast gloom of the
great basins in Tilbury, each of those places of restraint for
ships has its own peculiar physiognomy, its own expression. And
what makes them unique and attractive is their common trait of
being romantic in their usefulness.

In their way they are as romantic as the river they serve is unlike
all the other commercial streams of the world. The cosiness of the
St. Katherine's Dock, the old-world air of the London Docks, remain
impressed upon the memory. The docks down the river, abreast of
Woolwich, are imposing by their proportions and the vast scale of
the ugliness that forms their surroundings--ugliness so picturesque
as to become a delight to the eye. When one talks of the Thames
docks, "beauty" is a vain word, but romance has lived too long upon
this river not to have thrown a mantle of glamour upon its banks.

The antiquity of the port appeals to the imagination by the long
chain of adventurous enterprises that had their inception in the
town and floated out into the world on the waters of the river.
Even the newest of the docks, the Tilbury Dock, shares in the
glamour conferred by historical associations. Queen Elizabeth has
made one of her progresses down there, not one of her journeys of
pomp and ceremony, but an anxious business progress at a crisis of
national history. The menace of that time has passed away, and now
Tilbury is known by its docks. These are very modern, but their
remoteness and isolation upon the Essex marsh, the days of failure
attending their creation, invested them with a romantic air.