But never send a poet to London! This downright earnestness of all things, this colossal uniformity, this machine-like movement, this troubled spirit in pleasure itself, this exaggerated London, smothers the imagination and rends the heart. And should you ever send a German poet thither--a dreamer, who stares at everything, even a ragged beggar-woman, or the shining wares of a goldsmith's shop--why, then, at least he will find things going right badly with him, and he will be hustled about on every side, or perhaps be knocked over with a mild "God damn!" _God damn!_--damn the knocking about and pushing! I see at a glance that these people have enough to do. They live on a grand scale, and though food and clothes are dearer with them than with us, they must still be better fed and clothed than we are--as gentility requires. Moreover, they have enormous debts, yet occasionally, in a vainglorious mood, they make ducks and drakes of their guineas, pay other nations to box about for their pleasure, give their kings a handsome _douceur_ into the bargain; and, therefore, John Bull must work to get the money for such expenditure. By day and by night he must tax his brain to discover new machines, and he sits and reckons in the sweat of his brow, and runs and rushes, without much looking around, from the Docks to the Exchange, and from the Exchange to the Strand; and therefore it is quite pardonable if he, when a poor German poet, gazing into a print-shop window, stands bolt in his way on the corner of Cheapside, should knock the latter sideways with a rather rough "God damn!" But the picture at which I was gazing as I stood at Cheapside corner was that of the French crossing the Beresina. And when I, jolted out of my gazing, looked again on the raging street, where a parti-colored coil of men, women, and children, horses, stagecoaches, and with them a funeral, whirled groaning and creaking along, it seemed to me as though all London were such a Beresina Bridge, where every one presses on in mad haste to save his scrap of life; where the daring rider stamps down the poor pedestrian; where every one who falls is lost forever; where the best friends rush, without feeling, over one another's corpses; and where thousands in the weakness of death, and bleeding, grasp in vain at the planks of the bridge, and are shot down into the icy grave of death.