ches of the
bridge, breaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern cheek
of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and
the Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood against
descending tug and long tail of stern-ajerk empty barges; with a steamer
slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw;
and half-bottom-upward boats dancing harpooner beside their whale; along
an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of all nations, a
wintry woodland, every rag aloft curling to volume; and here the spouts
and the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke there, variously
undulated, curved to vanish; cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and
dash of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud overhead.

Surely a scene pretending to sublimity?

Gazeing along that grand highway of the voyageing forest, your London
citizen of good estate has reproached his country's poets for not
pouring out, succinctly and melodiously, his multitudinous larvae of
notions begotten by the scene. For there are times when he would, pay
to have them sung; and he feels them big; he thinks them human in their
bulk; they are Londinensian; they want but form and fire to get them
scored on the tablets of the quotable at festive boards. This he can
promise to his poets. As for otherwhere than at the festive, Commerce
invoked is a Goddess that will have the reek of those boards to fill her
nostrils, and poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime,
she leads them, after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive
into the turtle-tureen. Heels up they go, poet first--a plummet he!

And besides it is barely possible for our rounded citizen, in the mood
of meditation, to direct his gaze off the bridge along the waterway
North-eastward without beholding as an eye the glow of whitebait's
bow-window by the riverside, to the front of the summer sunset, a league
or so down stream; where he sees, in memory savours, the Elysian end of
Commerce: frontispiece of a tale to fetch us up the out-wearied spectre
of old Apicius; yea, and urge Crispinus to wheel his purse into the
market for the purchase of a costlier mullet!

But is the Jew of the usury gold becoming our despot-king of Commerce?

In that case, we do not ask our country's poets to compose a single
stanza of eulogy's rhymes--far from it. Far to the contrary, we bid
ourselves remember the sons of whom we are; instead of revelling