The sun shone joyously as I traveled through the manufacturing districts; saw their groups of towns and suburbs; saw their smoking pillars and pyramids towering up everywhere in the wide landscape—saw glowing gorges of fire open themselves in the earth, as if it were burning—a splendid and wonderfully picturesque spectacle, reminding one of fire-worshipers of ancient and modern time, and of their altars. But I heard the mournful cry of the children from the factories; the cry which the public voice has made audible to the world; the cry of the children, of the little ones who had been compelled by the lust of gain of their parents and the manufacturers, to sacrifice life, and joy, and health, in the workshops of machinery; the children who lie down in those beds which never are cold, the children who are driven and beaten till they sink insensibly into death or fatuity—that living death; I heard the wailing cry of the children, which Elizabeth Barrett interpreted in her affecting poem; and the wealthy manufacturing districts, with their towns, their fire-columns, their pyramids, seemed to me like an enormous temple of Moloch, in which the mammon-worshipers of England offered up even children to the burning arms of their god—children, the hope of the earth, and its most delicious and most beautiful joy! I arrived in London. They told me there was nobody in London. It was not the season in which the higher classes were in London. Besides which, the cholera was there; and all well-to-do people, who were able, had fled from the infected city. And that indeed might be the reason why there seemed to me to be so many out of health—why that pale countenance of want was so visible. Certain it is, that it became to me as a Medusa’s head, which stood between me and every thing beautiful and great in that great capital, the rich life and physiognomy of which would otherwise have enchanted me. But as it was, the palaces, and the statues, and the noble parks, Hampstead and Piccadilly, and Belgravia and Westminster, and the Tower, and even the Thames itself, with all its ever-changing life, were no more than the decorations of a great tragedy. And when in St. Paul’s, I heard the great roar of the voice of London—that roar, which, as it is said, never is silent, but merely slumbers for an hour between three and four o’clock in the morning—when I heard that voice in that empty church, where there was no divine worship, and looked up into its beautiful cupola, which was filled by no song of praise, but only by that resounding, roaring voice, a dark chaotic roar, then seemed I to perceive the sound of the rivers of fate rolling onward through time over falling kingdoms and people, and bearing them onward down into an immeasurable grave! It was but for a moment, but it was a horrible dream!