London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure

								

a bee-line over the top of the houses, and cross London thus. They use the
streets which they treat so lightly. They conform, for the time, to human
courses, and stroll down Bond Street and turn up Piccadilly, and go to the
Bank on a long west wind--their strolling being done at a certain height,
in moderate mid-air.

They generally travel wildly alone, but now and then you shall see two of
them, as you see butterflies go in couples, flitting at leisure at Charing
Cross. The extreme ends of their tender plumes have touched and have
lightly caught each other. But singly they go by all day, with long rises
and long descents as the breeze may sigh, or more quickly on a high level
way of theirs. Nothing wilder comes to town--not even the scent of hay on
morning winds at market-time in June; for the hay is for cab-horses, and
it is at home in the clattering mews, and has a London habit of its own.
White meteor, lost star, bright as a cloud, the seed has many images of
its radiant flight. But there is only one thing really like it--the point
of light caught by a diamond, with the regular surrounding rays.

THE EFFECT OF LONDON

It is no wonder if the painters of London are somewhat eager for the help
of smoke. A simple glance at the streets--and the glance that would
appreciate so mingled a sight as that of London must be simple--shows you
that the detail of our streets is the closest detail in the world. Nowhere
else do the houses, the carriages, and the people, all alike, wear the
minute spots of hard colour that make a London street by bright daylight
look so sharp and small. In cities abroad, for instance, you find some
blank spaces of wall on the fronts of the houses, narrow spaces in the
north, but wider and wider as you go south. In other cities is here and
there a closing of the eyelids with a smoothing of the faces of the
streets; here alone the unshuttered windows are set close together; the
street glances and chatters with the false vivacity of these perpetual
windows. Shops and windows run into rows all but touching one another, or
what interval there might have been betwixt is, by the care of architects,
in some manner harassed and beset.

Add to this the black garments of the crowd, which make every man
conspicuous in the light, and the abrupt and minute patches of
white--exceedingly pure white of sharp shapes and angles--scattered
throughout the drifting and intercrossing multitude. The white of a
footman's shirt, the white of the collars of innumerable men, the white
letters of advertisements, the white of the label at the back of cabs and
hansoms, and many and many another little square, triangle, and line of
white, are visible to the utmost distances. They have an emphasis that is
never softened; nothing, except snow, could be whiter; and nothing,