The approach was so clogged by pompous and overbearing pigeons.
As I bounced happily along, I would note many landmarks of historic interest. Some of these were real, and others made up by myself on the spur of the moment, to fit a passing thought.
For, if I saw an old building of picturesque interest, I could make myself more decently emotional toward the antiquity of it by assuring myself that that was where Sterne died, or where Pepys “made mighty merry.”
And, after all, facts are of little importance compared with “those things which really are—the eternal inner world of the imagination.”
It was from the outlook of a hansom cab that I could get some of the best views of my London. Every turn would bring new sorts of motion, sound, and color. And, birdseyed thus, it was all so beautiful that I wondered what Shelley meant by saying “Hell is a city very much like London,”—if, indeed, he did say it.
Once in the Tate Gallery, I would fall afresh under the spell of the lonely wistfulness of G. F. Watts’ Minotaur.
Then I would go to gaze long on Whistler’s wonderful notion of Battersea Bridge on a blue night, and then betake myself to the Turner collection.
Here I could spend hours, floundering in unintelligent delight among the pictures, sensitive to each apotheosis of color and beauty, and not caring whether its title might be Waves Breaking on a Flat Beach, or River Scene with Cattle.
But too much Turner was apt to go to my head, and just in time I would tear myself away, hop into a hansom, and make for the Wallace Collection to be brought back to a sense of human reality by a short interview with the Laughing Cavalier.