208 THRONGS OF LONDON.
there is a dreaminess, an uncertainty whether one is, of a very truth, in the world s great wilderness capi tal " Parts of it are so much like what have been seen at home, that we try to fancy we are still there. Names, too, with which we have been familiar from the lispings of our earliest lessons in geography, or whose imprint was in the most precious picture books of our nursery, assist this illusion. Paternoster Bow, Temple Bar, Charing Cross, The Strand, Fleet Street, Bolt Court, from whose sombre windows it it easy to imagine Dr. Johnson still looking out, are to us as household words. But when you see the press and struggle of the living mass, at high noon, through ome of the most frequented streets ; or when, on some throned Sabbath in St. Paul s, listen to the tread of the congregation, like the rush of many waters, upon the marble pavement of that vast ornate pile, you begin to realize that you are indeed in the midst of two mil lions of human beings. A kind of suffocating fear steals for a moment over you, lest you might never get clear of them, and breathe freely in your own native woods again; and then comes a deep feeling that you are as nothing among them ; that you might fall in the streets and die, unnoticed or trodden down ; that will all your home-indulgence, self-esteem, and vanity about YOU, you are only a speck, a cypher, a sand upon the seashore of creation : a conviction, humiliating, I
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Two millions of human beings ! Here they have their habitations, in every diversity of shelter, from the
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