When the first impression begins to fade, and he takes a closer view of the great metropolis of India—­and observes what miserable straw huts are intermingled with magnificent palaces—­how much Oriental filth and squalor and idleness and superstition and poverty and ignorance are associated with savage splendour, and are brought into immediate and most incongruous contact with Saxon energy and enterprize and taste and skill and love of order, and the amazing intelligence of the West in this nineteenth century—­and when familiarity breeds something like contempt for many things that originally excited a vague and pleasing wonder—­the English traveller in the East is apt to dwell too exclusively on the worst side of the picture, and to become insensible to the real interest, and blind to the actual beauty of much of the scene around him.  Extravagant astonishment and admiration, under the influence of novelty, a strong re-action, and a subsequent feeling of unreasonable disappointment, seem, in some degree, natural to all men; but in no other part of the world, and under no other circumstances, is this peculiarity of our condition more conspicuously displayed than in the case of Englishmen in India.  John Bull, who is always a grumbler even on his own shores, is sure to become a still more inveterate grumbler in other countries, and perhaps the climate of Bengal, producing lassitude and low spirits, and a yearning for their native land, of which they are so justly proud, contribute to make our countrymen in the East even more than usually unsusceptible of pleasurable emotions until at last they turn away in positive disgust from the scenes and objects which remind them that they are in a state of exile.

“There is nothing,” says Hamlet, “either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  At every change of the mind’s colored optics the scene before it changes also.  I have sometimes contemplated the vast metropolis of England—­or rather of the world—­multitudinous and mighty LONDON—­with the pride and hope and exultation, not of a patriot only, but of a cosmopolite—­a man.  Its grand national structures that seem built for eternity—­its noble institutions, charitable, and learned, and scientific, and artistical—­the genius and science and bravery and moral excellence within its countless walls—­have overwhelmed me with a sense of its glory and majesty and power.  But in a less admiring mood, I have quite reversed the picture.  Perhaps the following sonnet may seem to indicate that the writer while composing it, must have worn his colored spectacles.

LONDON, IN THE MORNING.

    The morning wakes, and through the misty air
    In sickly radiance struggles—­like the dream
    Of sorrow-shrouded hope.  O’er Thames’ dull stream,
    Whose sluggish waves a wealthy burden bear
    From every port and clime, the pallid glare
    Of early sun-light spreads.  The long streets seem
    Unpeopled still, but soon