“LONDON sings in my ears.” I remember writing this somewhere about the fourth or fifth day of my stay. It was delicious, the sense of novelty and wonder it gave me. I am one of those who have been raised on Dickens and Thackeray and Lamb, but I must confess I found little to corroborate¹ the world of vague impressions I had formed. Novels are a mere² expression of temperament³ anyhow.

 

New York and America are all so new, so lustful⁴ of change. Here, in these streets, when you walk out of a morning or an evening, you feel a pleasing stability. London is not going to change under your very eyes. You are not going to turn your back to find, on looking again, a whole sky line effaced⁵. The city is restful, naïve, in a way tender and sweet like an old song. London is more fatalistic and therefore less hopeful than New York.

 

One of the first things that impressed me, as I have said, was the grayish tinge⁶ of smoke that was over everything—a faint haze—and the next that as a city, street for street and square for square, it was not so strident as New York or Chicago—not nearly so harsh. The traffic was less noisy, the people more thoughtful and considerate, the so-called rush, which characterizes New York, less foolish. There is something rowdyish and ill-mannered about the street life of American cities. This was not true here. It struck me as simple, sedate⁷, thoughtful, and I could only conclude that it sprang from a less stirring atmosphere of opportunity. I fancy it is harder to78 get along in London. People do not change from one thing to another so much. The world there is more fixed⁸ in a pathetic routine, and people are more conscious of their so-called “betters.” In so far as I could judge on so short a notice, London seemed to me to represent a mood—a uniform, aware, conservative state of being, neither brilliant nor gay anywhere, though interesting always. About Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square,

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