The northward skyline grows more
intricate and pleasing, and more and more does one thank God for Wren.
Somerset House is as picturesque as the civil war, one is reminded again
of the original England, one feels in the fretted sky the quality of
Restoration Lace.
And then comes Astor's strong box and the lawyers' Inns.
(I had a passing memory of myself there, how once I had trudged along
the Embankment westward, weighing my uncle's offer of three hundred
pounds a year....)
Through that central essential London reach I drove, and X2 bored
her nose under the foam regardless of it all like a black hound going
through reeds--on what trail even I who made her cannot tell.
And in this reach, too, one first meets the seagulls and is reminded of
the sea. Blackfriars one takes--just under these two bridges and just
between them is the finest bridge moment in the world--and behold,
soaring up, hanging in the sky over a rude tumult of warehouses, over a
jostling competition of traders, irrelevantly beautiful and altogether
remote, Saint Paul's! "Of course!" one says, "Saint Paul's!" It is the
very figure of whatever fineness the old Anglican culture achieved,
detached, a more dignified and chastened Saint Peter's, colder, greyer,
but still ornate; it has never been over thrown, never disavowed, only
the tall warehouses and all the roar of traffic have forgotten it,
every one has forgotten it; the steamships, the barges, go heedlessly by
regardless of it, intricacies of telephone wires and poles cut blackly
into its thin mysteries, and presently, when in a moment the traffic
permits you and you look round for it, it has dissolved like a cloud
into the grey blues of the London sky.
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