kle of attractiveness at the instant. Down went the
twirling horizontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches of the
bridge, breaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern cheek
of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and the
Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood against
descending tug and long tail of stern-ajerk empty barges; with a steamer
slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw;
and half-bottom-upward boats dancing harpooner beside their whale; along
an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of all nations, a
wintry woodland, every rag aloft curling to volume; and here the spouts
and the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke there, variously
undulated, curved to vanish; cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and dash
of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud overhead.

Surely a scene pretending to sublimity?

Gazeing along that grand highway of the voyageing forest, your London
citizen of good estate has reproached his country's poets for not pouring
out, succinctly and melodiously, his multitudinous larvae of notions
begotten by the scene. For there are times when he would, pay to have
them sung; and he feels them big; he thinks them human in their bulk;
they are Londinensian; they want but form and fire to get them scored on
the tablets of the quotable at festive boards. This he can promise to his
poets. As for otherwhere than at the festive, Commerce invoked is a
Goddess that will have the reek of those boards to fill her nostrils, and
poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime, she leads them,
after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive into the
turtle-tureen. Heels up they go, poet first--a plummet he!

And besides it is barely possible for our rounded citizen, in the mood of
meditation, to direct his gaze off the bridge along the waterway
North-eastward without beholding as an eye the glow of whitebait's
bow-window by the riverside, to the front of the summer sunset, a league
or so down stream; where he sees, in memory savours, the Elysian end of
Commerce: frontispiece of a tale to fetch us up the out-wearied spectre
of old Apicius; yea, and urge Crispinus to wheel his purse into the
market for the purchase of a costlier mullet!

But is the Jew of the usury gold becoming our despot-king of Commerce?

In that case, we do not ask our country's poets to compose a single
stanza of eulogy's rhyme