blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be
imagined, decayed warehouses with blind windows, and wharves that
look ruinous; insomuch that, had I known nothing more of the world's
metropolis, I might have fancied that it had already experienced the
down-fall which I have heard commercial and financial prophets predict
for it, within the century. And the muddy tide of the Thames, reflecting
nothing, and hiding a million of unclean secrets within its breast,--a
sort of guilty conscience, as it were, unwholesome with the rivulets of
sin that constantly flow into it,--is just the dismal stream to glide
by such a city. The surface, to be sure, displays no lack of activity,
being fretted by the passage of a hundred steamers and covered with a
good deal of shipping, but mostly of a clumsier build than I had been
accustomed to see in the Mersey: a fact which I complacently attributed
to the smaller number of American clippers in the Thames, and the
less prevalent influence of American example in refining away the
broad-bottomed capacity of the old Dutch or English models. About midway
between Greenwich and London Bridge, at a rude landing-place on the left
bank of the river, the steamer rings its bell and makes a momentary
pause in front of a large circular structure, where it may be worth our
while to scramble ashore. It indicates the locality of one of those
prodigious practical blunders that would supply John Bull with a topic
of inexhaustible ridicule, if his cousin Jonathan had committed
them, but of which he himself perpetrates two to our one in the mere
wantonness of wealth that lacks better employment. The circular building
covers the entrance to the Thames Tunnel, and is surmounted by a dome of
glass, so as to throw daylight down into the great depth at which the
passage of the river commences. Descending a wearisome succession of
staircases, we at last find ourselves, still in the broad noon, standing
before a closed door, on opening which we behold the vista of an arched
corridor that extends into everlasting midnight. In these days, when
glass has been applied to so many new purposes, it is a pity that the
architect had not thought of arching portions of his abortive tunnel
with immense blocks of the lucid substance, over which the dusky Thames
would have flowed like a cloud, making the sub-fluvial avenue only
a little gloomier than a street of upper London. At present, it is
illuminated at regular intervals by jets o