In Europe I took a new lease of this feeling, this partiality for the span, and had daily opportunities to indulge and confirm it.  In London I had immense satisfaction in observing the bridges there, and in walking over them, firm as the geological strata and as enduring.  London Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Blackfriars, clearing the river in a few gigantic leaps, like things of life and motion,—­to pass over one of these bridges, or to sail under it, awakens the emotion of the sublime.  I think the moral value of such a bridge as the Waterloo must be inestimable.  It seems to me the British Empire itself is stronger for such a bridge, and that all public and private virtues are stronger.  In Paris, too, those superb monuments over the Seine,—­I think they alone ought to inspire the citizens with a love of permanence, and help hold them to stricter notions of law and dependence.  No doubt kings and tyrants know the value of these things, and as yet they certainly have the monopoly of them.

LONDON

I am too good a countryman to feel much at home in cities, and usually value them only as conveniences, but for London I conceived quite an affection; perhaps because it is so much like a natural formation itself, and strikes less loudly, or perhaps sharply, upon the senses than our great cities do.  It is a forest of brick and stone of the most stupendous dimensions, and one traverses it in the same adventurous kind of way that he does woods and mountains.  The maze and tangle of streets is something fearful, and any generalization of them a step not to be hastily taken.  My experience heretofore had been that cities generally were fractions that could be greatly reduced, but London I found I could not simplify, and every morning for weeks, when I came out of my hotel, it was a question whether my course lay in this, or in exactly the opposite direction.  It has no unit of structure, but is a vast aggregation of streets and houses, or in fact of towns and cities, which have to be mastered in detail.  I tried the third or fourth day to get a bird’s-eye view from the top of St. Paul’s, but saw through the rifts in the smoke only a waste,—­literally a waste of red tiles and chimney pots.  The confusion and desolation were complete.

But I finally mastered the city, in a measure, by the aid of a shilling map, which I carried with me wherever I went, and upon which, when I was lost, I would hunt myself up, thus making in the end a very suggestive and entertaining map.  Indeed, every inch of this piece of colored paper is alive to me.  If I did not make the map itself, I at least verified it, which is nearly as good, and the verification, on street corner by day and under lamp or by shop window at night, was often a matter of so much concern that I doubt if the original surveyor himself put more heart into certain parts of his work than I did in the proof of them.