Or what, on a fine morning of summer, can be more inspiring than the white and silver harmonies of Cheapside, dominated by the pale tower of St. Mary-le-Bow? Or the sublimity of the Houses of Parliament, that embattled mass with its tall tower, backed by stormy, gold-edged threatening clouds, through which the sunlight breaks? "Sky and cloud and smoke and buildings are all mingled as if they belonged to each other, and man's work stretching heavenward is touched with the sublimity of nature." Or Trafalgar Square, as I saw it lately, on a winter twilight; its tall pillars grey-black against a lurid sky, its fountain alchymised to a molten mass of pearl-white, its geysers to sparkling brilliants, a "nocturne" of silver and gold? Or the Turneresque brilliance of light and splendour on the river—that river to which London owes all her prosperity and all her fame—that river of which already, with true feeling and eighteenth-century artificiality, Alexander Pope wrote:—
"her figured streams in waves of silver rolled,
And on her banks Augusta rose in gold."
But of all the views of London, perhaps none is so fine, and certainly none is so comprehensive, as that which may be obtained, under favourable conditions, from Primrose Hill—that "little molehill," as it has been called, "in the great wen's northern flank." It is a splendid and inspiring panorama. Few people know of it; yet it is a sight not to be forgotten. Go thither on a clear spring or summer evening, three-quarters of an hour before sunset, and you will be richly repaid. What a view! Grime and dinginess are as they were not; the smoky atmosphere is transformed, as if by magic, to a golden, transparent haze—mellowing, brightening, idealising. "Who," as a recent writer says, "would have imagined that this grimy, smoky wilderness of houses, with its factories and its slums, ... could ever look like the fair and beautiful city of some ethereal vision, embosomed in trees and full of glorious stately monuments? It is even so. Regent's Park lies below, a frame of restful greenery. To the left rises Camden Town—prosaic neighbourhood!—up a gentle slope. In the evening sunlight it is transfigured into a mass of brightness and colour, rising in clear-cut terraces, like some fair city on an Italian hill-top. St. Pancras Station is a thing of beauty, with a Gothic spire, and lines like those of a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal. Hard by rises the dome of the Reading-Room of the British Museum, embowered in trees—a stately witness to the learning of a continent. St. Paul's soars up grandly above its sister spires, in misty purple—dominating feature of the city—as St. Peter's in Rome. Away towards the mouth of the river rises the high line of Blackheath, and the hills of the Thames valley curve round in a noble sweep above the light haze which marks the unseen river, past the crest of Sydenham Hill with the Crystal Palace shining out white and clear, past Big Ben and the Abbey, and the Mother of Parliaments, to where the ridges above Guildford and Dorking fade away into 'the fringes of the southward-facing brow' of Sussex and Hampshire, towards the English Channel. Innumerable slender church spires point upwards to the wide overarching sky. Northward, again, are the wooded heights of Highgate and Hampstead, and the long battlemented line of the fortress at Holloway. What a view! On Primrose Hill on a summer's evening the Londoner feels, indeed, that he is a citizen of no mean city. Wordsworth, truly, thought that 'Earth had not anything to show more fair' than the view from Westminster Bridge in the early morning. But it needs a modern poet—a poet of the whole English-speaking race—to do justice to this view of the great city on the Thames, lying bathed in the magic glow of a summer sunset beneath Primrose Hill."
A Jury.
CHAPTER XVII
THE WAYS OF LONDONERS
"Laughing, weeping, hurrying ever,
Hour by hour they crowd along,
While below the mighty river
Sings them all a mocking song."—Molloy.
"An ever-muttering prisoned storm,
The heart of London beating warm."—John Davidson.