with so many suggestions.
These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far from it. But they are of
every possible kind, and this is the interest of London. Those that were
most forcible during the showery Easter season were certain of the more
perplexing and depressing ones; but even with these was mingled a
brighter strain.

I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon--walked from
Piccadilly across the Green Park and through St. James's Park. The parks
were densely filled with the populace--the elder people shuffling about
the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling over the
dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a dense group of people
about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them and succeeded in
reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible to advance, and I
may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into the church and
promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact and, beneath the
Gothic arches, the odor was not that of incense. I slowly eliminated
myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that one feels
in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent
disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly
speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are
too plentiful. Whereever you go you make the observation. Go to the
theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find
that, before you arrive, there are people enough on the field. You are a
tight fit in your place wherever you find it; you have too many
companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of
thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were,
swallows up quality, and such perpetual familiarity contains the germs
of contempt. This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England
is to own a "park"--an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the
middle of a few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the
crowd by the breadth, at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a
comfort which circumstances make peculiarly precious. But I walked back
through the parks in the midst of these "circumstances," and I found
that entertainment which I never fail to derive from a great English
assemblage. The English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest people
in Europe that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe that
the fact requires proof. I n