nt? Everything in London and its vicinity has been depleted
innumerable times, but never once translated into intelligible images;
it is an "old, old story," never yet told, nor to be told. While writing
these reminiscences, I am continually impressed with the futility of the
effort to give any creative truth to my sketch, so that it might produce
such pictures in the reader's mind as would cause the original scenes
to appear familiar when afterwards beheld. Nor have other writers often
been more successful in representing definite objects prophetically to
my own mind. In truth, I believe that the chief delight and advantage of
this kind of literature is not for any real information that it
supplies to untravelled people, but for reviving the recollections and
reawakening the emotions of persons already acquainted with the scenes
described. Thus I found an exquisite pleasure, the other day, in reading
Mr. Tuckerman's "Month in England,"--a fine example of the way in which
a refined and cultivated American looks at the Old Country, the things
that he naturally seeks there, and the modes of feeling and reflection
which they excite. Correct outlines avail little or nothing, though
truth of coloring may be somewhat more efficacious. Impressions,
however, states of mind produced by interesting and remarkable objects,
these, if truthfully and vividly recorded, may work a genuine effect,
and, though but the result of what we see, go farther towards
representing the actual scene than any direct effort to paint it. Give
the emotions that cluster about it, and, without being able to analyze
the spell by which it is summoned up, you get something like a
simulachre of the object in the midst of them. From some of the above
reflections I draw the comfortable inference, that, the longer and
better known a thing may be, so much the more eligible is it as the
subject of a descriptive sketch.

On a Sunday afternoon, I passed through a side--entrance in the
time-blackened wall of a place of worship, and found myself among a
congregation assembled in one of the transepts and the immediately
contiguous portion of the nave. It was a vast old edifice, spacious
enough, within the extent covered by its pillared roof and overspread by
its stone pavement, to accommodate the whole of church-going London, and
with a far wider and loftier concave than any human power of lungs could
fill with audible prayer. Oaken benches were arranged in the transep