ehall! How momentous was the
sunrise in St. James's Park, and how significant the clustering knot of
listeners and speakers beneath the tall column that lifts our Nelson to
the windy sky!

For a time Benham was in love with the idea of London. He got maps of
London and books about London. He made plans to explore its various
regions. He tried to grasp it all, from the conscious picturesqueness of
its garden suburbs to the factories of Croydon, from the clerk-villadoms
of Ealing to the inky streams of Bow. In those days there were passenger
steamboats that would take one from the meadows of Hampton Court past
the whole spectacle of London out to the shipping at Greenwich and the
towed liners, the incessant tugs, the heaving portals of the sea....
His time was far too occupied for him to carry out a tithe of these
expeditions he had planned, but he had many walks that bristled with
impressions. Northward and southward, eastward and westward a dreaming
young man could wander into a wilderness of population, polite or
sombre, poor, rich, or middle-class, but all ceaselessly active, all
urgently pressing, as it seemed, to their part in the drama of the
coming years. He loved the late afternoon, when every artery is injected
and gorged with the multitudinous home-going of the daily workers, he
loved the time of lighting up, and the clustering excitements of the
late hours. And he went out southward and eastward into gaunt regions of
reeking toil. As yet he knew nothing of the realities of industrialism.
He saw only the beauty of the great chimneys that rose against the
sullen smoke-barred sunsets, and he felt only the romance of the lurid
shuddering flares that burst out from squat stacks of brickwork and lit
the emptiness of strange and slovenly streets....

And this London was only the foreground of the great scene upon which
he, as a prosperous, well-befriended young Englishman, was free to
play whatever part he could. This narrow turbid tidal river by which he
walked ran out under the bridges eastward beneath the grey-blue clouds
towards Germany, towards Russia, and towards Asia, which still seemed in
those days so largely the Englishman's Asia. And when you turned about
at Blackfriars Bridge this sense of the round world was so upon you
that you faced not merely Westminster, but the icy Atlantic and America,
which one could yet fancy was a land of Englishmen--Englishmen a little
estranged. At any rate they assimilated,