WESTMINSTER BY NIGHT
As we pass on we can see the high bastion towers of Scotland Yard. Northumberland Avenue stretches over ground which was once the gardens of Northumberland House—they came down to the water—and beyond this were quadrangles and a medley of buildings, mostly low and mostly of brick, which formed the palace of Whitehall, snatched by Henry VIII. from Wolsey because the royal palace at Westminster had fallen into decay. The Houses of Parliament, standing on the site of the latter palace, are the finest work of Barry, who has been abused for many things, but who seems to have been touched by a genuine spirit of architecture in this instance, and to have realised the right characteristics of majesty and delicacy in his work. But he had a noble chance, for the position of the building, standing on the edge of the water, with the bridge rising beside it, gave room for a fine conception.
From Westminster to the Tower or Fleet prison, how many prisoners have come and gone—come up against the current full of hope, and returned of hope bereft! The ghosts are endless, because the river was the usual mode of communication between the Tower and the Court at Westminster, as the Strand was full of holes and seamed by watercourses. If this reach of water were to tell its tale, much of the history of England would be interwoven with it, and it would be tinged with the bitterest sorrow human life can know—death with disgrace.
From the time of Edward the Confessor to the time of Henry VIII., our kings were housed at Westminster as one of the chief of their royal palaces. Luckily the Great Hall, which Rufus built, escaped the fire of 1834, and still may be seen, but all else, with the exception of the crypt of St. Stephen's, has vanished utterly.
The time to see the Houses of Parliament is undoubtedly at night, when Big Ben's illuminated face sheds a sort of ethereal light on the architectural fretwork near him.
Wordsworth admired the view most in the early morning, before the first waking of the great world of bustle and business:
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky,