At that moment, however, all their dovecots were secure. I should not have spent a sigh on the Venus de Medicis had she sprung from her pedestal to enchant me. The world was open before me; and trite and trifling objects were no more to occupy my time. I felt like one who, after wandering all day through the depths of an American forest, suddenly reaches its border, and sees before him the boundless prairie, with its boundlessness still more striking, from the absence of any distinct object on which the eye could rest. What were horses, dogs, and country dinners, to the world of London and of life which now came in full, and, I will own it, extravagant vision before me? The ideas which I conceived of men and things, of my own fortunes, and the fortunate exercise of my own powers, were of an order which, in my calmer days, have often made me smile; yet what is the whole early life of man but a predisposition to fever? and I was then throbbing on the fiery verge of the disease. I shall say but little of my first sensations on reaching London. My eyes and ears were in full activity. But the impression upon all who enter this mightiest of capitals for the first time, is nearly the same. Its perpetual multitude, its incessant movement, its variety of occupations, sights and sounds, the echo of the whole vast and sleepless 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.