extreme dimension of our proudest edifice, public or private. Another
reason is in the London atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all the
effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly
reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower
Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts
you from the varied commonplace of the commercial structures on either
hand is the loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet
Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you with the
sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day
is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather often
have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous smoke, and a
lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an effect of majesty
and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the shadow momently
thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish-green
light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and the meaner houses
render the rifts between more impressively chasmal. The tremendous
volume of life that flows through the narrow and winding channels past
the dim cliffs and pinnacles, and the lower banks which the lesser
buildings form, is such that the highest tide of Broadway or Fifth
Avenue seems a scanty ebb beside it. The swelling and towering
omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous
hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts,
donkey-carts, handcarts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way
amid the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering
the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single
monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had
run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You
are now a molecule of that vast organism, as you sit under your umbrella
on your omnibus-top, with the public waterproof apron across your knees,
and feel in supreme degree the insensate exultation of being part of the