industries or different quarters of the town. Reading their meaning in
the light of history, I make bare walls speak to me with a personal
voice. Let any one but acquaint himself with the styles of
ecclesiastical or domestic architecture, or of monuments of the dead, or
with the history of the thoroughfares he frequents, and he will be
pleasantly constrained to reflection upon those who have gone before
him. As he stands in the shadow of an ancient church he will think to
himself: "By this very wall Chaucer may have stood." As he walks amid
the reverberating ravines which are city streets he will say: "Here
along green and silent paths the Roman legionary marched when Hadrian
ruled the world." When once the faculty of observation has been awakened
to a permanent alertness, the desire to be widely read in history of men
and their arts will become irresistible; and through the knowledge
gradually amassed it will be thought a sorry chance if any ramble of
wider compass yield no vision which in comeliness or deformity tells its
tale of changing fortune. To appreciate human work, and the conditions
under which it is born, is to exult in abounding sympathy with this
man's conquest over things poor in promise, or to condole with that
man's failure to do the best that in him lay.

As I walk by the strand of Thames, my fancy sees upon one flood the gay
barge gliding upward to green fields, and the black hull bearing down
the prisoner to the Traitors' Gate. If I go up Holborn, I remember that
where this traffic now thunders John Gerard tended his Physic Garden
when Elizabeth was queen. I know where Sarah Siddons lived; and where
William Blake died; and my curious wanderings are now so far extended,
that when I turn to the great book of London I seldom find a tedious
page. The places where people strove and suffered evoke before me the
forms of men and women dead but unforgotten, and if I am alone I am not
aware of loneliness.

London is the central wonder, but wonderful also in spirit and
suggestion are those old places which ring it round: these I often
frequent at every season, and carry their portraits over my heart. Let a
man once learn to know them, and his memory shall never starve; he will
never forget the hour when first they yielded him up their secret. Many
moments of intimate delight do I treasure in remembrance, moments when I
was suddenly aware that all previous impressions were the poor
gatherings of purblind eye