How natural Temple Bar looks, with the loaded coach and the cab going through the central arch, and the blur of the hurrying throng darkening the small lateral ones! A fine old structure,—always reminds a Bostonian of the old arch over which the mysterious Boston Library was said still to linger out its existence late into the present century. But where are the spikes on which the rebels' heads used to grin until their jaws fell off? They must have been ranged along that ledge which forms the chord of the arch surmounting the triple-gated structure. To the left a woman is spreading an awning before a shop;—a man would do it for her here. Ghost of a boy with bundle,—seen with right eye only. Other ghosts of passers or loiterers,—one of a pretty woman, as we fancy at least, by the way she turns her face to us. To the right, fragments of signs, as follow:
22
PAT
CO BR PR
What can this be but 229, Patent Combs and Brushes, PROUT? At any rate, we were looking after Front's good old establishment, (229, Strand,) which we remembered was close to Temple Bar, when we discovered these fragments, the rest being cut off by the limits of the picture.
London Bridge! Less imposing than Waterloo Bridge, but a massive pile of masonry, which looks as if its rounded piers would defy the Thames as long as those of the Bridge of Sant' Angelo have stemmed the Tiber. Figures indistinct or invisible, as usual, in the foreground, but farther on a mingled procession of coaches, cabs, carts, and people. See the groups in the recesses over the piers. The parapet is breast-high;—a woman can climb over it, and drop or leap into the dark stream lying in deep shadow under the arches. Women take this leap often. The angels hear them like the splash of drops of blood out of the heart of our humanity. In the distance, wharves, storehouses, stately edifices, steeples, and rising proudly above them, "like a tall bully," London Monument.
Here we are, close to the Monument. Tall, square base, with reliefs, fluted columns, queer top;—looks like an inverted wineglass with a shaving-brush standing up on it: representative of flame, probably. Below this the square cage in which people who have climbed the stairs are standing; seems to be ten or twelve feet high, and is barred or wired over. Women used to jump off from the Monument as well as from London Bridge, before they made the cage safe in this way.
"Holloa!" said a man standing in the square one day, to his companion,—"there's the flag coming down from the Monument!"
"It's no flag," said the other, "it's a woman!"
Sure enough, and so it was.
Nobody can mistake the four pepper-boxes, with the four weathercocks on them, surmounting the corners of a great square castle, a little way from the river's edge. That is the Tower of London. We see it behind the masts of sailing-vessels and the chimneys of steamers, gray and misty in the distance. Let us come nearer to it. Four square towers, crowned by four Oriental-looking domes, not unlike the lower half of an inverted balloon: these towers at the angles of a square building with buttressed and battlemented walls, with two ranges of round-arched windows on the side towards us. But connected with this building are other towers, round, square, octagon, walls with embrasures, moats, loop-holes, turrets, parapets,—looking as if the beef-eaters really meant to hold out, if a new army of Boulogne should cross over some fine morning. We can't stop to go in and see the lions this morning, for we have come in sight of a great dome, and we cannot take our eyes away from it.