Here are some of my first impressions of England as seen from the carriage and from the cars.—­How very English!  I recall Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape,—­a beautiful, poetical series of views, but hardly more poetical than the reality.  How thoroughly England is groomed!  Our New England out-of-doors landscape often looks as if it had just got out of bed, and had not finished its toilet.  The glowing green of everything strikes me:  green hedges in place of our rail-fences, always ugly, and our rude stone-walls, which are not wanting in a certain look of fitness approaching to comeliness, and are really picturesque when lichen-coated, but poor features of landscape as compared to these universal hedges.  I am disappointed in the trees, so far; I have not seen one large tree as yet.  Most of those I see are of very moderate dimensions, feathered all the way up their long slender trunks, with a lop-sided mop of leaves at the top, like a wig which has slipped awry.  I trust that I am not finding everything couleur de rose; but I certainly do find the cheeks of children and young persons of such brilliant rosy hue as I do not remember that I have ever seen before.  I am almost ready to think this and that child’s face has been colored from a pink saucer.  If the Saxon youth exposed for sale at Rome, in the days of Pope Gregory the Great, had complexions like these children, no wonder that the pontiff exclaimed, Not Angli, but angeli!  All this may sound a little extravagant, but I am giving my impressions without any intentional exaggeration.  How far these first impressions may be modified by after-experiences there will be time enough to find out and to tell.  It is better to set them down at once just as they are.  A first impression is one never to be repeated; the second look will see much that was not noticed before, but it will not reproduce the sharp lines of the first proof, which is always interesting, no matter what the eye or the mind fixes upon.  “I see men as trees walking.”  That first experience could not be mended.  When Dickens landed in Boston, he was struck with the brightness of all the objects he saw,—­buildings, signs, and so forth.  When I landed in Liverpool, everything looked very dark, very dingy, very massive, in the streets I drove through.  So in London, but in a week it all seemed natural enough.

We got to the hotel where we had engaged quarters, at eleven o’clock in the evening of Wednesday, the 12th of May.  Everything was ready for us,—­a bright fire blazing and supper waiting.  When we came to look at the accommodations, we found they were not at all adapted to our needs.  It was impossible to stay there another night.  So early the next morning we sent out our courier-maid, a dove from the ark, to find us a place where we could rest the soles of our feet.  London is a nation of something like four millions of inhabitants, and one does not feel easy without he has an assured place