The Pinnacles And Turrets Of That Vast And
Magnificent Structure, Built Of A Cream-Colored Stone, And Florid With
Gothic Tracery, Copied From The Ancient Chapel Of St. Stephen, The Greater
Part Of Which Was Not Long Ago Destroyed By Fire, Are Rising From Day To
Day Above The City Roofs.
We walked through its broad and long passages
and looked into its unfinished halls, swarming with stone-cutters and
masons, and thought that if half of them were to be painted in fresco, the
best artists of England have the work of years before them.
With the exhibition of drawings in water-colors, which is a separate
affair from the paintings in oil, I was much better pleased. The late
improvement in this branch of art, is, I believe, entirely due to English
artists. They have given to their drawings of this class a richness, a
force of effect, a depth of shadow and strength of light, and a truth of
representation which astonishes those who are accustomed only to the
meagreness and tenuity of the old manner. I have hardly seen any
landscapes which exceeded, in the perfectness of the illusion, one or two
which I saw in the collection I visited, and I could hardly persuade
myself that a flower-piece on which I looked, representing a bunch of
hollyhocks, was not the real thing after all, so crisp were the leaves, so
juicy the stalks, and with such skillful relief was flower heaped upon
flower and leaf upon leaf.
Letter XXI
The Parks of London. - The Police.
London, _June_ 24, 1845.
Nothing can be more striking to one who is accustomed to the little
inclosures called public parks in our American cities, than the spacious,
open grounds of London. I doubt, in fact, whether any person fully
comprehends their extent, from any of the ordinary descriptions of them,
until he has seen them or tried to walk over them. You begin at the east
end of St. James's Park, and proceed along its graveled walks, and its
colonnades of old trees, among its thickets of ornamental shrubs carefully
inclosed, its grass-plots maintained in perpetual freshness and verdure by
the moist climate and the ever-dropping skies, its artificial sheets of
water covered with aquatic birds of the most beautiful species, until you
begin almost to wonder whether the park has a western extremity. You reach
it at last, and proceed between the green fields of Constitution Hill,
when you find yourself at the corner of Hyde Park, a much more spacious
pleasure-ground. You proceed westward in Hyde Park until you are weary,
when you find yourself on the verge of Kensington Gardens, a vast extent
of ancient woods and intervening lawns, to which the eye sees no limit,
and in whose walks it seems as if the whole population of London might
lose itself. North of Hyde Park, after passing a few streets, you reach
the great square of Regent's Park, where, as you stand at one boundary the
other is almost undistinguishable in the dull London atmosphere. North of
this park rises Primrose Hill, a bare, grassy eminence, which I hear has
been purchased for a public ground and will be planted with trees. All
round these immense inclosures, presses the densest population of the
civilized world. Within, such is their extent, is a fresh and pure
atmosphere, and the odors of plants and flowers, and the twittering of
innumerable birds more musical than those of our own woods, which build
and rear their young here, and the hum of insects in the sunshine. Without
are close and crowded streets, swarming with foot-passengers, and choked
with drays and carriages.
These parks have been called the lungs of London, and so important are
they regarded to the public health and the happiness of the people, that I
believe a proposal to dispense with some part of their extent, and cover
it with streets and houses, would be regarded in much the same manner as a
proposal to hang every tenth man in London. They will probably remain
public grounds as long as London has an existence.
The population of your city, increasing with such prodigious rapidity;
your sultry summers, and the corrupt atmosphere generated in hot and
crowded streets, make it a cause of regret that in laying out New York, no
preparation was made, while it was yet practicable, for a range of parks
and public gardens along the central part of the island or elsewhere, to
remain perpetually for the refreshment and recreation of the citizens
during the torrid heats of the warm season. There are yet unoccupied lands
on the island which might, I suppose, be procured for the purpose, and
which, on account of their rocky and uneven surface, might be laid out
into surpassingly beautiful pleasure-grounds; but while we are discussing
the subject the advancing population of the city is sweeping over them and
covering them from our reach.
If we go out of the parks into the streets we find the causes of a corrupt
atmosphere much more carefully removed than with us. The streets of London
are always clean. Every day, early in the morning, they are swept; and
some of them, I believe, at other hours also, by a machine drawn by one of
the powerful dray-horses of this country. Whenever an unusually large and
fine horse of this breed is produced in the country, he is sent to the
London market, and remarkable animals they are, of a height and stature
almost elephantine, large-limbed, slow-paced, shaggy-footed, sweeping the
ground with their fetlocks, each huge foot armed with a shoe weighing from
five to six pounds. One of these strong creatures is harnessed to a
street-cleaning machine, which consists of brushes turning over a cylinder
and sweeping the dust of the streets into a kind of box. Whether it be wet
or dry dust, or mud, the work is thoroughly performed; it is all drawn
into the receptacle provided for it, and the huge horse stalks backward
and forward along the street until it is almost as clean as a
drawing-room.
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