In our course, we have passed beneath half a dozen bridges, and, emerging out of the black heart of London, shall soon reach a cleanly suburb, where old Father Thames, if I remember, begins to put on an aspect of unpolluted innocence.  And now we look back upon the mass of innumerable roofs, out of which rise steeples, towers, columns, and the great crowning Dome,—­look back, in short, upon that mystery of the world’s proudest city, amid which a man so longs and loves to be:  not, perhaps, because it contains much that is positively admirable and enjoyable, but because, at all events, the world has nothing better.  The cream of external life is there; and whatever merely intellectual or material good we fail to find perfect in London, we may as well content ourselves to seek that unattainable thing no farther on this earth.

The steamer terminates its trip at Chelsea, an old town endowed with a prodigious number of pot-houses, and some famous gardens, called the Cremorne, for public amusement.  The most noticeable thing, however, is Chelsea Hospital, which, like that of Greenwich, was founded, I believe, by Charles II., (whose bronze statue, in the guise of an old Roman, stands in the centre of the quadrangle,) and appropriated as a home for aged and infirm soldiers of the British army.  The edifices are of three stories with windows in the high roofs, and are built of dark, sombre brick, with stone edgings and facings.  The effect is by no means that of grandeur, (which is somewhat disagreeably an attribute of Greenwich Hospital,) but a quiet and venerable neatness.  At each extremity of the street-front there is a spacious and hospitably open gateway, lounging about which I saw some gray veterans in long scarlet coats of an antique fashion, and the cocked hats of a century ago, or occasionally a modern foraging-cap.  Almost all of them moved with a rheumatic gait, two or three stumped on wooden legs, and here and there an arm was missing.  Inquiring of one of these fragmentary heroes whether a stranger could be admitted to see the establishment, he replied most cordially, “Oh, yes, Sir,—­anywhere!  Walk in, and go where you please,—­up-stairs, or anywhere!” So I entered, and, passing along the inner side of the quadrangle, came to the door of the chapel, which forms a part of the contiguity of edifices next the street.  Here another pensioner, an old warrior of exceedingly peaceable and Christian demeanor, touched his three-cornered hat and asked if I wished to see the interior; to which I assenting, he unlocked the door, and we went in.

The chapel consists of a great hall with a vaulted roof, and over the altar is a large painting in fresco, the subject of which I did not trouble myself to make out.  More appropriate adornments of the place, dedicated as well to martial reminiscences as religious worship, are the long ranges of dusty and tattered banners that hang from their staves alt round the ceiling of the chapel.  They are trophies of battles