looking down, we found with a shock that we had our feet upon his grave.
It might have been the wounded sense of reverence, it might have been
the dread of a longer sermon than we had time for, but we left before
the sermon began, and went out into the rather unkempt little public
garden which lies by the Thames in the shadow of the Parliament Houses;
and who has said the Houses are not fine? They are not a thousand years
old, but some day they will be, and then those who cavilled at them when
they were only fifty will be sorry. For my part I think them as
Gothically noble and majestic as need be. They are inevitably Gothic,
too, and they spring from the river-side as if they grew from the ground
there far into the gray sky to which their architecture is native. It
was a pale, resigned afternoon, with the languor of the long, unwonted
heat in it, which a recent rain had slightly abated, and we were glad of
a memoriferous property which it seemed to exhale. Suddenly in the midst
of that most alien environment we confronted a pair of friends from whom
we had last parted twenty years before in the woods beside Lake George,
and whose apparition at once implied the sylvan scene. So improbable, so
sensational is life even to the most bigoted realist! But if it is so,
why go outside of it? Our friends passed, and we were in the shadow of
the Parliament Houses again, and no longer in that of the forest which
did not know it was Gothic.

We were going to hang upon the parapet of Westminster Bridge for the
view it offers of the Houses, to which the spacious river makes itself a
foreground such as few pictures or subjects of pictures enjoy in this
cluttered world; but first we gave ourselves the pleasure of realizing
the statue of Cromwell which has somehow found place where it belongs in
those stately precincts, after long, vain endeavors to ignore his
sovereign mightiness. He was not much more a friend of Parliaments than
Charles whom he slew, but he was such a massive piece of English history