jestic a sweep--the river. It is the
river of chimneys; they stand, on either bank, as unequal in growth as a
group of children; they crowd together, they stand apart, they straggle,
but if they have any law, it is the river's. They mark its path as reeds
and rushes might do in meadows. The hidden reaches are traced by this
black growth, followed and discovered. The chimneys will hardly let the
river go, but cling to the track of his waters when the town is dwindling
eastwards, and stand conspicuous among the flats when the houses have at
last, at last, ceased. Apart from the river they are almost as rare in
London as in Naples, and it is not to them we owe the chief part of our
'sky,' but to the steamers, to the trains, and, more than all, to the
unnumbered houses. If ever London is to be restored to her own mists--not
to great brightness, but to the tender exhalations that are now burlesqued
by smoke, to the true climate of nature, the marshes, and the north, it
will obviously be the work of laws touching the houses rather than the
factories.

The river is perpetually overhung, involved, tangled, in that indefinite
and unshapely cloud. It looks blue from the Greenwich hill, but not blue
with the blue of pure sunny waters; it is blue because blue is the trick
of this midsummer light seen from this one point. The blue road lies open
and flat, from the dazzling confusion of the west, whence it comes, to the
dimmer confusion of the north, whither the great curve tends. It is a road
more level than the tyrannously level rails, but there is no haste in it.
The unceasing motion of the tidal Thames seems to make it wait about the
bridges of London. The accustomed versifier himself will hardly bid it
flow on, so often is it seen to flow back. Because it is so constantly
chidden and driven by the sea, the long tendency, brought from its first
source and kept between so many fields and over all the noisy weirs, is
concealed. That flowing lurks still, but you cannot find it among the
rhythmic tides. It is not expressed, and there is no sense of the final
sea in the coming and going of these turbid waters. The unceasing seaward
flow is their secret.

But it is only upon this ambiguous road of the river that any human motion
is perceptible in this distant view. Barges are seen to float heavy and
flat, and at certain points there is the vague suggestion of some stir at
wharf or pier. Otherwise the scene keeps all its hurry out of si