Such is the splendour, such the misery, of the richest, largest, most powerful city in the world! And over all the seething tides of the river and of humanity--the luxury and wretchedness--the "laughing, weeping, hurrying ever" of the crowd, still the grey dome of St. Paul's dominates the scene, still its "cross of gold shines over city and river," calm and changeless above all tides and passions. Browning has suggested the poetry of the view from the dome: "Over the ball of it, Peering and prying, How I see all of it, Life there outlying! Roughness and smoothness, Shine and defilement, Grace and uncouthness, One reconcilement." Beyond the Tower Bridge, and beyond the docks and the East End, the glitter of Greenwich comes in, striking yet another note in the ever-changing key. This palace of Greenwich, set like a jewel among its green hills and parks, was the favourite royal abode of the Tudor Sovereigns. Here Elizabeth was born, and lived in state, and here her brother Edward, the boy-king, died in the flower of his youth. The shining Observatory crowns the hill of Greenwich Park--a welcome oasis of green after the "midnight mirk" of the East End through which we have passed; and the fair frontage of the Palace recalls to us the historic mood in which we began our wanderings. Beautiful now with a new beauty, a twentieth century beauty--how lovely, in a different way, it must have been in those distant ages, when the splendid gilt barges of the nobles, with their gaily-painted awnings, were moored at their palatial water gates; when fair ladies sang to guitars as their craft glided smoothly "under tower and balcony, by garden-wall and gallery"; when each citizen had his private wherry, when loaded "tilt-boats," filled with merry passengers, plied up and down between Greenwich and Westminster. As is the Oxford, the Godstow Thames of to-day, the London Thames was then; "the stream of pleasure," no less than of wealth. Gazing, through the gathering twilight, over towards the misty shadow of vast St. Paul's, seen behind the gleaming tower of St. Magnus, or towards the shimmering expanse of water under the wharves of "London Pool," you can still be oblivious to the present changes; but presently you are rudely awakened by the very unpleasant grating of the steamer against its flimsy wooden quay; and the dulcet strains of "the Last Ro-wse of Summer," played to a somewhat wheezy accordion, reach your ears in very un-Tudor and un-toward fashion. Roman London, Saxon London, Elizabethan London, all fade, like Lamb's "dream-children," into the far-away past;--giving place to Victorian London,--as, jostled by a motley and not too immaculate crowd, you scramble sadly across the rickety gangway to the very common-place and unpalatial shore below London Bridge. [Illustration: _An Underground Station._] CHAPTER III RAMBLES IN THE CITY