terious if we remember and mysterious if we forget. I
had even stirring in my head the suggestion of some verses that I shall
never finish--

If I ever go back to Baltimore
The city of Maryland.

But the poem would have to contain far too much; for I was thinking of a
thousand things at once; and wondering what the children would be like
twenty years after and whether they would travel in white goods or be
interested in oil, and I was not untouched (it may be said) by the fact
that a neighbouring shop had provided the only sample of the substance
called 'tea' ever found on the American continent; and in front of me
soared up into the sky on wings of stone the column of all those high
hopes of humanity a hundred years ago; and beyond there were lighted
candles in the chapels and prayers in the ante-chambers, where perhaps
already a Prince of the Church was dying. Only on a later page can I
even attempt to comb out such a tangle of contrasts, which is indeed the
tangle of America and this mortal life; but sitting there on that stone
seat under that quiet sky, I had some experience of the thronging
thousands of living thoughts and things, noisy and numberless as birds,
that give its everlasting vivacity and vitality to a dead town.

Two other cities I visited which have this particular type of
traditional character, the one being typical of the North and the other
of the South. At least I may take as convenient anti-types the towns of
Boston and St. Louis; and we might add Nashville as being a shade more
truly southern than St. Louis. To the extreme South, in the sense of
what is called the Black Belt, I never went at all. Now English
travellers expect the South to be somewhat traditional; but they are not
prepared for the aspects of Boston in the North which are even more so.
If we wished only for an antic of antithesis, we might say that on one
side the places are more prosaic than the names and on the other the
names are more prosaic than the places. St. Louis is a fine town, and we
recognise a fine instinct of the imagination that set on the hill
overlooking the river the statue of that holy horseman who has
christened the city. But the city is not as beautiful as its name; it
could not be. Indeed these titles set up a standard to which the most
splendid spires and turrets could not rise, and below which the
commercial chimneys and sky-signs conspicuously sink. We should think it
odd if Belfast had bor