ifferent London from
that great greyly-overcast, smoke-stained house-wilderness of my first
impressions. I reached it by Victoria and not by Cannon Street, and its
centre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber, blue-grey
and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London of
hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens
and labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and
artificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton at a house in a
little square.

So London faced me the second time, making me forget altogether for a
while the grey, drizzling city visage that had first looked upon me. I
settled down and went to and fro to my lectures and laboratory; in
the beginning I worked hard, and only slowly did the curiosity that
presently possessed me to know more of this huge urban province arise,
the desire to find something beyond mechanism that I could serve, some
use other than learning. With this was a growing sense of loneliness,
a desire for adventure and intercourse. I found myself in the evenings
poring over a map of London I had bought, instead of copying out lecture
notes--and on Sundays I made explorations, taking omnibus rides east and
west and north and south, and to enlarging and broadening the sense of
great swarming hinterlands of humanity with whom I had no dealings, of
whom I knew nothing....

The whole illimitable place teemed with suggestions of indefinite and
sometimes outrageous possibility, of hidden but magnificent meanings.

It wasn't simply that I received a vast impression of space and
multitude and opportunity; intimate things also were suddenly dragged
from neglected, veiled and darkened corners into an acute vividness of
perception. Close at hand in the big art museum I came for the first
time upon the beauty of nudity, which I had hitherto held to be a
shameful secret, flaunted and gloried in; I was made aware of beauty
as not only permissible, but desirable and frequent and of a thousand
hitherto unsuspected rich aspects of life. One night in a real rapture,
I walked round the upper gallery of the Albert Hall and listened for
the first time to great music; I believe now that it was a rendering of
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony....

My apprehension of spaces and places was reinforced by a quickened
apprehension of persons. A constant stream of people passed by me,
eyes met and challenged mine and passed--more and more I wante