The bridge was now at hand. Over the parapet to the left, and considerably below them, long rows of lights, illuminating the walls and doorways of life-deserted warehouses, filled with merchandise from all parts of the world, pointed out the site of that thronged and noisy gully Thames Street. Before them, farther on, lost in mist, and yet lingering smoke, which gave to sky, buildings, and water, one common neutral colour, rose beyond the water one solitary tower, looming darker than all around it, but relieved still farther back by a flush of dull, mysterious light, which, though it showed nothing distinctly, yet emphatically marked the existence, to an undefined extent, of many an unseen mass of building like that by which they were immediately surrounded. And now they are on the bridge alone. It is not yet five. The sight is magnificent. Behold these two sides of a mighty city separated by a scarcely-seen gulf, on which streams of light, reflected from night-lamps afar off, ripple as though so many of the pillars of fire that lighted the Israelites of old were on the waves. Up the great stream, or down it,--the uprear-ing of men's hands,--house, church, and palace appear alike illimitable. All those mean and minor details, which confound the eye and distract the attention during daylight, are now swallowed up and resolved into one broad whole. The dense and unmeasured mass of building which meets the sight every way, seems resolved into a solid. Line on line and height on height extending away till lost utterly in the far obscurity of the void horizon. Without any great strain of the imagination this scene might be mistaken for a splendid dream of Tyre or Palmyra, or of Babylon on the Euphrates, great cities of old, whose giant memories loom in the mind as images that cannot be fully compassed from their very vastness. While under our feet flows the ghastly river, the dull, deceptive stream that has borne on its bosom the wealth of kingdoms; that has found in its bed a thousand last resting-places for human misery, when the link that bound unhappiness and life together became too galling to be any more endured; and that in its stormy wrath has swallowed happiness suddenly, when jollity forgot in its temporary delirium that boats are frail, and that but a slender plank, which a wave might founder, stood between itself and a deep grave.