seems to have presided over their making--a temper combining the
necessary readjustment of past and present, with a spirit of sensitive
conservation for those buildings which more and more England will
realize as having a lasting value for her spirit.

So far as I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism
as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar
heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than
to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal
spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of
them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral,
or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who
will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them
in their graves.

Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new
theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a
far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I
can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of
course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the
reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and
so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in
the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up
expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's
destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced
not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own
internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice
crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with
girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new
unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past.