shows that the artillery preparation for the attack is over, while, at the bottom of the descent, yonder grim rows of tenements are the forlorn hope of the escalade.
This sea, this army, is London.
It might be thought that a spectator, standing on such a vantage-ground as Traitor's Hill, on the edge of Highgate, would see below him thoroughfares crowded with citizens, and would hear the noise of the millions at his feet. But such is not the case. The busy hum of men does not reach even hither, and the scene of their hurry and their hubbub might as well be a tomb. A silence weighs from coast to coast, while the eye, ranging from horizon to horizon, lights not in that wilderness of man's handiwork, and amid that chaos of roofs, chimneys, spires, and turrets, upon the presence of a single man. So that this incomparable assembly of the living might be one wide sarcophagus of the dead.
But, if the eye, seeking to penetrate into that nether abyss, is thus baffled, the mind knows of course that here are lives in unique abundance. Are they, and all of us together, moving towards a worse or a better fortune? That is what the spectator on Traitor's Hill looks across the dumb and dreary leagues of the living to know.
Such a theme of observation would be less difficult than it is, if the energies of a people were ever concentrated undividedly on one definite
