I sit on the front seat of a horse ’bus elbow to elbow with the driver, staring down over the brink of the abyss upon ears and necks—­that low, distant space where the horses look so tiny and so ineffectual and so gone-by below.

The street is the true path of the spirit.  To walk through it, or roll or swing on top of a ’bus through it—­the miles of faces, all these tottering, toddling, swinging miles of legs and stomachs; and on all sides of you, and in the windows and along the walks, the things they wear, and the things they eat, and the things they pour down their little throats, and the things they pray to and curse and worship and swindle in!  It is like being out in the middle of a great ocean of living, or like climbing up some great mountain-height of people, their abysses and their clouds about them, their precipices and jungles and heavens, the great high roads of their souls reaching off....  I can never say why, but so strange is it, so full of awe is it, and of splendour and pity, that there are times when, rolling and swinging along on top of a ’bus, with all this strange, fearful joy of life about me, within me ... it is as if on top of my ’bus I had been far away in some infinite place, and had felt Heaven and Hell sweep past.

One of the first things that strikes an American when he slips over from New York, and finds himself, almost before he had thought of it—­walking down the Strand, suddenly, instead of Broadway, is the way things—­thousands of things at once; begin happening to him.

Of course, with all the things that are happening to him—­the ’buses, the taxis, the Wren steeples, the great streams of new sights in the streets, the things that happen to his eyes and to his ears, to his feet and his hands, and to his body lunging through the ground and swimming up in space on top of a ’bus through this huge, glorious, yellow mist of people ... there are all the things besides that begin happening to his mind.

In New York, of course, he rushes along through the city, in a kind of tunnel of his own thoughts, of his own affairs, and drives on to his point, and New York does not—­at least it does not very often—­make things happen to his mind.  He is not in London five minutes before he begins to notice how London does his thinking for him.  The streets of the city set him to thinking, mile after mile, miles of comparing, miles of expecting.

And above the streets that he walks through and drives through he finds in London another complete set of streets that interest him:  the greater, silenter streets of England—­the streets of people’s thoughts.  And he reads the great newspapers, those huge highways on which the English people are really going somewhere.... “Where are they going?” He goes through the editorials, he stumbles through the news, “Where are the English people going?”

* * * * *

An American thinks of the English people in the third person—­at first, of course.