This new London, which is almost rural, creeps already up these large hills, and spreads itself, from season to season, in the fields which environ them, to go by lower, more active, and more smoky suburbs, to rejoin, as far as the eye can see, the Thames, beyond which the same phenomenon is reproduced on the hills and in the plains on the other side. In surveying this the eye loses itself as if on the waves of the ocean. On every side the horizon is too narrow to embrace that town, and the town continues beyond the horizon; but every where also the sky, the air, the country, the verdure, the waters, the tops of the oaks, are mixed with that vegetation of stones, of marble, and of bricks, and appears to make of new London, not an arid and dead city, but a fertile and living province, which germinates at the same time with men and trees, with habitations and fields; a city of which the nature has not been changed, but in which, on the contrary, nature and civilization respect each other, seek for and clasp each other, for the health and joy of man, in a mutual embrace. Between these two banks of the river, and between its steeples and its towers--between the tops of its oaks, respected by the constructors of these new quarters--you perceive a movable forest of masts, which ascend and descend perpetually the course of the Thames, and streak it with a thousand lines of smoke, while the steamers, loaded with passengers, stream out like a river of smoke above the river of water which carries them. But it is not in the newly constructed quarters alone that London has changed its appearance, and presents that image of opulence, of comfort, and of labor, with thriving--the city itself, that furnace at the same time blackened and infect of this human ebullition, has enlarged its issues, widened its streets, ennobled its monuments, extended and straightened its suburbs, and made them more healthy. The ignoble lanes, with their suspicious taverns, where the population of drunken sailors huddled together like savages in dregs and dust, have been demolished. They have given place to airy streets, where the passers-by, coming back from the docks, those entrepôts of the four continents, pass with ease in carriages or on foot--to spacious and clean houses, to modest but decent shops, where the maritime population find, on disembarking, clothes, food, tobacco, beer, and all the objects of exchange necessary for the retail trade of seaports: those streets are now as well cleaned from filth, from drunkenness and obscenity, as the other streets and suburbs of the city. One can pass through them without pity and without disgust; one feels in them the vigilance of public morality and the presence of a police which, if it can not destroy vice, can at all events keep it at a distance from the eyes of the passer-by, and render even the _cloacæ_ inoffensive.