While the steamboat, and with it our conversation, swam thus along the stream, the sun had set, and his last rays lit up the hospital at Greenwich, an imposing palace-like building which in reality consists of two wings, the space between which is empty, and a green hill crowned with a pretty little tower from which one can behold the passers-by. On the water the throng of vessels became denser and denser, and I wondered at the adroitness with which they avoided collision. While passing, many a sober and friendly face nodded greetings--faces whom we had never seen before, and were never to see again. We sometimes came so near that it was possible to shake hands in joint welcome and adieu. One's heart swells at the sight of so many bellying sails, and we feel strangely moved when the confused hum and far-off dance-music, and the deep voices of sailors, resound from the shore. But the outlines of all things vanished little by little behind the white veil of the evening mist, and there remained visible only a forest of masts, rising long and bare above it. The sallow man still stood near me and gazed reflectively on high, as though he sought for the pale stars in the cloudy heaven. And, still gazing aloft, he laid his hand on my shoulder, and said in a tone as though secret thoughts involuntarily became words--"Freedom and equality! they are not to be found on earth below nor in heaven above. The stars on high are not alike, for one is greater and brighter than another; none of them wanders free, all obey a prescribed and iron-like law--there is slavery in heaven as on earth!" "There is the Tower!" suddenly cried one of our traveling companions, as he pointed to a high building which rose like a spectral, gloomy dream above the cloud-covered London. * * * * * LONDON I have seen the greatest wonder which the world can show to the astonished spirit; I have seen it, and am still astonished; and still there remains fixed in my memory the stone forest of houses, and amid them the rushing stream of faces of living men with all their motley passions, all their terrible impulses of love, of hunger, and of hatred--I mean London. Send a _philosopher_ to London, but, for your life, no poet! Send a philosopher there, and station him at a corner of Cheapside, where he will learn more than from all the books of the last Leipzig fair; and as the billows of human life roar around him, so will a sea of new thoughts rise before him, and the Eternal Spirit which moves upon the face of the waters will breathe upon him; the most hidden secrets of social harmony will be suddenly revealed to him; he will hear the pulse of the world beat audibly, and see it visibly; for if London is the right hand of the world--its active, mighty right hand--then we may regard that route which leads from the Exchange to Downing Street as the world's pyloric artery.