recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself
more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of
Spenser, where he speaks of this spot:

"There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide,
Till they decayd through pride."

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What
a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first
time--the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street,
by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares,
its classic green recesses! what a cheerful, liberal look
hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks
the greater garden, that goodly pile

"Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,"

confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more
fantastically shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the
cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure)
right opposite the stately stream, which washes the
garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and
seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man
would give something to have been born in such places. What
a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where
the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how
many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my
contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its
recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the
wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now
almost effaced sun-dials with their moral inscriptions,
seeming co-evals with that Time which they measured, and to
take their revelations of its flight immediately from
heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light!
How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by
the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never
catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests
of sleep!

"Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!"

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous
embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness
of communication, compared