The first impression is that of a distinctly striking town; the vast Royal Palace and the huge Northern Museum produce a very individual effect, though hardly perhaps one that can be called monumental. All the conspicuous buildings are in some variety of the Classic style, several erected during the last few years. The streets are broad, but geography forbids any great regularity, excepting to the north and south. All roads lead to the water, except a few that lead to the woods; the chief ones pass through wide squares and parks. Immensely improved is the city since 1847, when an English traveller wrote: "The natural advantages of approach are not adequately appreciated, or rather done justice to by the Swedes. Their whole style of architecture is mean to a degree; and their houses on each side of the Mälar quite unworthy that superb piece of water. With a few of the old palaces of Venice on each bank, and trees at intervals, and a gondola or two afloat, the northern capital, from its more romantic environs, would far exceed the other."[112] The site indeed is almost unexcelled. So far as natural beauty goes, the owners of these nine bridge-linked islands[113] need not envy the dwellers on the Seven Hills. From the narrows that the islands guard broad waters spread far on almost every side; Lake Mälar ripples gently for nearly eighty miles toward the west, splashing towns and villages and rocks and woods, and pours its broad waters swiftly past the islands toward the sea. Ocean steamers are moored by the wide busy quays of the prosperous city: small steamboats supplement the trolley trams to provide communications for the town. Toward the interior four lines of railway thread their way among the farms and the woods. For the vast silent forests of the North touch the immediate outskirts of the town; and trees are planted wherever the streets leave a small space unused. By far the most conspicuous building, weirdly attractive by its complete incongruity with its surroundings, is the immense Royal Palace, a magnific pile in the heaviest French Classic style, whose rectangular courtyard is enclosed by a block measuring no less than 408 by 381 feet, and rising in three storeys to a height of nearly a hundred feet. These ample dimensions are increased by wings of about half the elevation projecting eastward toward the water front, and by another on the west that greatly lengthens the north façade. This structure, whose simplicity and grandeur made an impression on Fergusson, occupies quite a considerable portion of the original island of Staden.