Add to this the black garments of the crowd, which make every man
conspicuous in the light, and the abrupt and minute patches of
white--exceedingly pure white of sharp shapes and angles--scattered
throughout the drifting and intercrossing multitude. The white of a
footman's shirt, the white of the collars of innumerable men, the white
letters of advertisements, the white of the label at the back of cabs and
hansoms, and many and many another little square, triangle, and line of
white, are visible to the utmost distances. They have an emphasis that is
never softened; nothing, except snow, could be whiter; and nothing,
perhaps, makes so salient a part of the enormous fragmentariness of the
street view.

[Illustration: AN IMPRESSION.]

There might be as much detail in some other scenes, but that they have not
these shreds and patches of black and white. Of all landscape, for
instance, that of the small culture of Italy and of parts of the East is,
perhaps, the most minute. A little rill of vine is crossed by a short
patch of corn, and among all the sprinkled foliage of fruit-trees, the
olive, with the smallest leaf of all, is the most constant. There is no
liberty, and your sight is taken in a net of green crops; it is trapped on
the ground by tendrils of cucumber, and cannot rise because of maize and
beans, nor can it fly for branches. No tract of grass is wide enough to
make a space of quiet green, and the eyes are kept busy by delicate things
in perpetual interchange. It is not the multitude of a wide clover-field,
where one stroke of the breeze turns a million little faces of flowers
eastwards, for there is hardly any repetition, but an unending
obstruction. Nor can you see anything that is quite simple, unless,
pushing aside a branch of fig-tree with this hand, and a bough of peach
with that, you lift your eyes to the indescribable simplicity of the
distance of mountains.

Or there is infinite detail in a Thames-side bank of woods between
Maidenhead and Cookham, when all the leaves are out, and all still
young--the characteristic local green of beech, alder, poplar, and ash,
all still unlike each other and undarkened; every separate leaf faced with
colour and light, and backed by mystery and shadow. But yet neither this
nor anything else in nature shows the innumerable minuteness of London in
the sun. The summer sun sends a peremptory summons to every patch of
omnibus, red or blue, to every scrap of harnes