e holiday-people, we come to one of the gate-ways of
Greenwich Park, opening through an old brick wall. It admits us from the
bare heath into a scene of antique cultivation and woodland ornament,
traversed in all directions by avenues of trees, many of which bear
tokens of a venerable age. These broad and well-kept pathways rise and
decline over the elevations and along the bases of gentle hills which
diversify the whole surface of the Park. The loftiest and most abrupt of
them (though but of very moderate height) is one of the earth's noted
summits, and may hold up its head with Mont Blanc and Chimborazo, as
being the site of Greenwich Observatory, where, if all nations will
consent to say so, the longitude of our great globe begins. I used to
regulate my watch by the broad dial-plate against the Observatory-wall,
and felt it pleasant to be standing at the very centre of Time and
Space.

There are lovelier parks than this in the neighborhood of London, richer
scenes of greensward and cultivated trees; and Kensington, especially,
in a summer afternoon, has seemed to me as delightful as any place can
or ought to be, in a world which, some time or other, we must quit. But
Greenwich, too, is beautiful,--a spot where the art of man has conspired
with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken counsel together
how to make a pleasant scene, and the longest liver of the two had
faithfully carried out their mutual design. It has, likewise, an
additional charm of its own, because, to all appearance, it is the
people's property and play-ground in a much more genuine way than the
aristocratic resorts in closer vicinity to the metropolis. It affords
one of the instances in which the monarch's property is actually the
people's, and shows how much more natural is their relation to the
sovereign than to the nobility, which pretends to hold the intervening
space between the two: for a nobleman makes a paradise only for himself,
and fills it with his own pomp and pride; whereas the people are sooner
or later the legitimate inheritors of whatever beauty kings and queens
create, as now of Greenwich Park. On Sundays, when the sun shone, and
even on those grim and sombre days when, if it do not actually rain,
the English persist in calling it fine weather, it was good to see how
sturdily the plebeians trod under their own oaks, and what fulness of
simple enjoyment they evidently found there. They were the people,--not
the populace,--sp