London! great, magnificent, wonderful London! was the thought which presented itself again and again, during my peregrinations and my visits to various districts of this immense city, and at the contemplation of its rich, varied physiognomy. From the city, where trade lives, strives, and posts its books, speculates and battles for life and death in smoky, gloomy streets and alleys, to Hampstead, where the country joins the town, and children ride upon asses over green hills and dales; from the crowded, noisy Strand, which you can scarcely cross for the throngs of omnibuses and carriages which are unceasingly driving along it, to the silent, elegant Belgravia; from the closely built portions of the city, where human beings live in crowded courts and wretched dens, like moles in the earth, without pleasure and without light, to the immense, magnificent parks—justly called the “lungs of London,” where people wander calmly beneath green trees, or beside the clear little lakes, on which rare water-birds swim rejoicingly; from Westminster to the Tower, from St. Paul’s to Pall Mall and Piccadilly, and so on; all along the Thames, the broad Thames, with its affluent life, with its splendid bridges, with its steam-boats, swift as arrows, which bow down their chimneys as they shoot onward under these bridges—what an abundance of great, characteristic and strong feature is here combined with beautiful detail!—the splendid palaces, the elegant detached houses, with their gardens before them, the markets, with their flowing fountains, the numerous small green inclosures, with their trees and bushes, which are met with every here and there as a refreshment to the eye of the wanderers—these, and many other similar objects. And on all hands that great preponderance of substantial, wealthy, handsome, well-built, well-arranged houses. In especial must I remark the way in which London, and, in fact, in which all English towns go out into, or up into, the country. It is not, as in many other nations, by the houses becoming smaller, uglier, by smoky chimneys becoming more numerous, marshes more extensive, the refuse of the city more perceptible. No! on the contrary, the gardens become more numerous and more extensive, the houses handsomer and more open, the streets of the town expand and become rows of beautiful villas and cottages, stone becomes less rare, flowers more frequent, the gray is changed into green; one remarks a something “_con amore_” in the care which is bestowed upon every dwelling, upon every grass-plot, in the luxuriant growth of every creeper which is trained up the walls of the houses and which engarlands their windows; in every iron palisade, which at once incloses and ornaments every plot of garden ground, and by the meaning of that English word _comfort_ being above all things made evident to the mind of the observer.