machinery of national existence, have been a thousand times the subject
of description, and always of wonder. Yet, I must acknowledge, that its
first sight repelled me. I had lived in field and forest, my society had
been among my fellows in rank; I had lived in magnificent halls, and
been surrounded by bowing attendants; and now, with my mind full of the
calm magnificence of English noble life, I felt myself flung into the
midst of a numberless, miscellaneous, noisy rabble, all rushing on
regardless of every thing but themselves, pouring through endless lines
of dingy houses; and I nothing, an atom in the confusion, a grain of
dust on the great chariot wheel of society, a lonely and obscure
struggler in the mighty current of human life, which rolled along the
sullen channels of the most cheerless, however it might be the largest,
of capitals.

For the first week, I was absolutely unable to collect my thoughts. All
that I learned was, to make my way through the principal thoroughfares,
and know the names of her chief buildings. In later days, I took a more
practical view of matters, and regarded them only as places in which the
business of the hour was to be done. But in my first view, something of
the romance and revival of my forest walks clung to me. I remember that,
when I first saw the Horse Guards, to which, of course, one of my
earliest visits was paid, I found no slight difficulty in thinking of it
as only a remarkably clownish mass of brick and stone, crowded with
clerks. To me it was the very palace of war; the spot from which the
thunderbolts of England were launched; the centre and the stronghold of
that irresistible influence with which England sways and moulds mankind.
The India House was another of my reveries. I could not think of it as
but a huge pile in a vulgar outlet of the city, as a place of porters
and messengers loitering in gloomy corridors, of busy clerks for ever
scribbling in nooks unvisited by the sun, or even of portly directors,