That sham Gothic
bridge; in the very gates of our mother of change, the Sea!
But after that one is in a world of accident and nature. For the third
part of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order, and precedence;
it is the seaport and the sea. One goes down the widening reaches
through a monstrous variety of shipping, great steamers, great
sailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the world, a monstrous
confusion of lighters, witches' conferences of brown-sailed barges,
wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars,
and wharves and stores, and assertive inscriptions. Huge vistas of dock
open right and left of one, and here and there beyond and amidst it all
are church towers, little patches of indescribably old-fashioned and
worn-out houses, riverside pubs and the like, vestiges of townships that
were long since torn to fragments and submerged in these new growths.
And amidst it all no plan appears, no intention, no comprehensive
desire. That is the very key of it all. Each day one feels that the
pressure of commerce and traffic grew, grew insensibly monstrous, and
first this man made a wharf and that erected a crane, and then this
company set to work and then that, and so they jostled together to make
this unassimilable enormity of traffic.
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