And it is altogether in the fitness of things that the river should be both introduction and entrance gate, so to speak, of modern London. For it is the river, it is our "Father Thames," indeed, that has made London what it is. In our childhood we used to learn in dull geography books, as inseparable addition to the name of any city, that it was "situated" on such-and-such a river; facts that we then saw little interest in committing to memory, but, nevertheless vastly important; how important, we see from this city of London. For London is, and was, primarily a seaport. In Sir Walter Besant's interesting pages may be read the story of the early settlers--Briton, Roman, Saxon, Norman--who successively founded their infant settlements on this marshy site, and had here their primitive wharves, quays, and trading ships for hides, cattle, and merchandise. It is the river, more than anything else, that recalls the past history of London. For London, ever increasing, ever rebuilt, has buried most of her eventful past in an oblivion far deeper than that of Herculaneum. Nothing destroys antiquity like energy; nothing blots out the old like the new. London, ever rising, like the phoenix, from her own ashes, has by the intense vitality of her "to-days" always obliterated her "yesterdays." It is only in dead or sleeping towns that the ashes of the past can be preserved in their integrity, and London has ever been intensely alive. Yet, gazing on the silvery flow of the river, we can imagine the Roman embankment, the hanging gardens, that once stretched from St. Paul's to the Tower; the Roman city, with its forums and basilicas, that once crowned prosaic Ludgate Hill--Roman pinnace, Briton coracle, Saxon ship, Tudor vessel--we can see them all in their turn--crowned by the spectacle of Queen Elizabeth in her gaily-hung state barge, with her royal procession; or, in more mournful key, her body, on its death-canopy--a barge "black as a funeral scarf from stern to stem," on that sad occasion when "The Queen did come by water to Whitehall. The oars at every stroke did teares let fall." If in the crowded day of London--with the shouting of bargees, the whistle of steam-tugs, and the puffing of the smoke-belching trains overhead, indulgence in such dreams is well-nigh impossible,--in the mysterious night, when the slow misty moon of London climbs, it is easy, even from an alcove of Waterloo Bridge, to indulge the fancies of "That inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude."