collectivity, that populous commonwealth of famous citizens whose census
can hardly be taken, you must come away and own, in the welcome
obscurity to which you plunge among the millions of her capital, that in
all-round greatness we have hardly even the imagination of her
transcendence.

Well towards fifty years had passed between my first and last visits to
London, but I think I had kept for it throughout that long interval much
more of the earlier sentiment than for any other city that I have known.
I do not wish to be mystical, and I hesitate to say that this sentiment
was continuous through the smell of the coal-smoke, or that the smoke
formed a solution in which all associations were held, and from which
they were, from time to time, precipitated in specific memories. The
peculiar odor had at once made me at home in London, for it had probably
so saturated my first consciousness in the little black, smoky town on
the Ohio River, where I was born, that I found myself in a most intimate
element when I now inhaled it. But apart from this personal magic, the
London smoke has always seemed to me full of charm. Of course it is
mostly the smoke which gives "atmosphere," softens outlines, tenderly
blurs forms, makes near and far the same, and _intenerisce il
cuore_, for any him whose infant sense it bathed. No doubt it
thickens the constant damp, and lends mass and viscosity to the fog; but
it is over-blamed and under-praised. It is chiefly objectionable, it is
wholly deplorable, indeed, when it descends in those sooty particles,
the _blacks;_ but in all my London sojourns I have had but one
experience of the blacks, and I will not condemn the smoke because of
them. It gives a wild pathetic glamour to the late winter sunrises and
the early winter sunsets, the beauty of which dwells still in my mind
from my first London sojourn. In my most recent autumn, it mellowed the
noons to the softest effulgence; in the summer it was a veil in the air