s, to all the broken,
inconsequent accents, all equal, all divided, and all leaping to light.

In regard to movement, the scenery of the streets has no likeness to
anything in nature. Clouds wing one way, streams flow, trees toss, thrill,
and remain, but the crowd moves all ways without ever changing its spots,
its dull violence of colour and contrast. Summer and day make the streets
impossible for the painter. But the summer of London is most local and
characteristic--not only in the west, when the scent of mignonette and the
recurrent click of the bearing-rein and bit where carriages stand waiting
are the very signs of town; summer at the Bank, summer that gives to the
walls of Lombard Street a faint hint of reflected light, and fills at a
glance ten thousand serried windows with the images of the sun. If there
is everywhere a lack of spirit and sweetness, it is only that sunshine,
with every tree and every flower, is converted to London and turns a
Londoner.

But such charm as there may still be in the touches of the sun are
perceptible rather in the few streets that keep their ancient narrowness.
Here there is precisely the possibility of that inter-reflection of
sunshine and warm light, from house to facing house, which in its gentle
splendour is the chief loveliness of summer in southern cities, where
walls are here and there blank, and tenderly coloured. Reflected light is
the beauty of shadows, and really one may see a shadow faintly so
transformed in the course of the delicate curves of City streets. Such
curves are not in the wider streets; they are beautiful, apart from the
chances and changes of light which they foster, and many a narrow street
leading to the right and to the left out of Cheapside, or some other of
the central London ways, takes curves as subtle as those of a swimming
fish's tail. Otherwise London curves are distressingly ugly and
dreary--those of a crescent, for example. But as much as the crescent
offends, the light wave of a fish's-tail street pleases the eye, with its
fine deflections. A wave of this kind is frequent enough in villages, but
a certain height in the houses gives it all its character in London.

Some of these alleys, on one side at least, have also the charm, which is
the rarest thing in town, of a certain steepness in incline. They dip as
they waver, with a motion that tells of a direction towards water. Whether
in village or town there is sea or river, a hidden Mediterra