Nor is the vast city to be valued only for what it gives, but for its own wonderful self, an obvious point which need not be expanded into a tedious circle. The shy will naturally draw more advantage from so rich a field of contemplation than those who seldom walk alone. In London I often map out a course of wandering which in its varied stages shall remind me of the change in progress or decay of particular arts or industries or different quarters of the town. Reading their meaning in the light of history, I make bare walls speak to me with a personal voice. Let any one but acquaint himself with the styles of ecclesiastical or domestic architecture, or of monuments of the dead, or with the history of the thoroughfares he frequents, and he will be pleasantly constrained to reflection upon those who have gone before him. As he stands in the shadow of an ancient church he will think to himself: "By this very wall Chaucer may have stood." As he walks amid the reverberating ravines which are city streets he will say: "Here along green and silent paths the Roman legionary marched when Hadrian ruled the world." When once the faculty of observation has been awakened to a permanent alertness, the desire to be widely read in history of men and their arts will become irresistible; and through the knowledge gradually amassed it will be thought a sorry chance if any ramble of wider compass yield no vision which in comeliness or deformity tells its tale of changing fortune. To appreciate human work, and the conditions under which it is born, is to exult in abounding sympathy with this man's conquest over things poor in promise, or to condole with that man's failure to do the best that in him lay. As I walk by the strand of Thames, my fancy sees upon one flood the gay barge gliding upward to green fields, and the black hull bearing down the prisoner to the Traitors' Gate. If I go up Holborn, I remember that where this traffic now thunders John Gerard tended his Physic Garden when Elizabeth was queen. I know where Sarah Siddons lived; and where William Blake died; and my curious wanderings are now so far extended, that when I turn to the great book of London I seldom find a tedious page. The places where people strove and suffered evoke before me the forms of men and women dead but unforgotten, and if I am alone I am not aware of loneliness.