ce, and it is in fact dwelt
in--propped in the serried row that has the sightless aspect of a
barn. There is therefore almost nothing of what used to be called the
picturesque. Nevertheless, the whole continuous line has far more approach
to beauty than any street of 'handsome' houses with columns and porticoes
in the whole of western London; moreover, it is much finer than Regent
Street. For the form of the normal warehouse is anything but bad; there is
a good deal of plain wall, which--unless a building be in every way
wrong--gives dignity; the windows are not too many, and for a mile at once
the general repeated form is that of a single gable and a flat front. With
this you cannot have anything entirely corrupt.

True, now and then there is a region or tract of buildings--'works,' these
seem to be, not warehouses--that touch the extremity of possible ugliness
and dreariness, and are flat-roofed, rectangular, and, without
exaggeration, black. These are very few--two or three at the most--and all
on the right bank. Otherwise the skyline of buildings is low, broken,
pointed, and very various.

Low as it is, it is always--seen from the deck of a boat--the very
skyline. From that low point of view the scene is made of river and boats,
warehouses, and sky. Of the thronging town beyond, on either bank, nothing
appears; you have got rid of streets, and, with streets, of all the
movement, the rattle, the people, the inland perspectives. The face of
river-side buildings looks almost unbroken; it lets no glimpse pass
through. There might be marshes or fields beyond; it is only by the map
that you know these two dark banks to be the edges and hems of cities.

The swarthiness, the darkness of the colour--a brownish grey--is to be
insisted upon; yet to none but a careless eye does the lower Thames seem
all brown and grey. The dull hues are shot with one single prevailing
colour--red. Innumerable red-tiled roofs are seen as the turn of the river
shows their dusky sides; iron sheds are ruddled with the red that signs
flocks of country sheep; shutters are red over warehouse windows (this is
a Sunday view), and everywhere are the red sails of Venice, dyed in the
selfsame dye, only differently lighted. Even when there is a difficulty in
fixing the place of this negroid blush, it is perceptibly there. It is
latent, even when no red sail rises between grey water and grey sky; it
lurks in hollows and inlets so darkly as to be almost blac