thing changed at once: London, the greatest city of the world, at last turned her interesting face to me. And, after a Western fashion, I kissed her. We became one. Let me tell you how I found her beauty.

It was about four o'clock, or earlier than that, of one day in the month of December. I always feel curious, and even ambitious, about that hour, as there is some time yet before supper, and I feel as if my day's work was done. I was standing on Westminster Bridge, but not without a reason; as it was the "pea-soup day," London's mental attitude, I thought, was quite dubious. How I complained of the fact that she was sticking too close to her own senses (also to the earth); how I wished even once she could act fantastically. Her geographical transcendency looked now to me extremely poetical, though not verily beautiful; it is my opinion the real poetry has to do only a little with beauty. I was almost in a delirium or dream (here standing on the bridge perfectly sieged by the greyness of fog), where neither latitude nor longitude bothered me; the only difference between me and the doves that swarmed around me on the most intimate terms was that I could not fly. It was, indeed,

the first time that the old soul of London even appeared to flirt with me through the almost frivolous sway of those doves' wings. I was much pleased with it. The fogs hid the ugly sign of a certain drink on the other side; the audacities of Cleopatra's Needle that often made me uncertain at once calmed down in a graceful way unimaginable. I raised my head, and alas, observed to my great surprise two unusually large suns in real old gold, in the East and West, on both sides of the bridge where, as I said, I had to have a little talk with the doves. I was glad to say that the thing of wonder appeared by magic at last in London. I would not listen, I decided, if anybody might say that one of the red balls on the lower skies was but the moon. Under my feet Thames stopped running down. "What a picture!" I exclaimed. "Oh, what fogs!"

Joaquin Miller, my old California friend, often told me that I would best avoid the word of fog in poetry; he even inclined to call Poe vulgar from only that one point of his frequent use of it. But Miller's beloved word "mist" with, as it always seems to me, lightness of spring, was hardly the word I could substitute in the place of London fogs which

swim, even jump, almost like a whale of fantastic shape. It was only in those days of fogs when London was pleased to be lost in the grey vastness of mystery that I could speculate on my poetical feeling; I confess that I doubted at the beginning of my arrival on the real relation of the city with Keats or Tennyson, as the people here appeared not to speak the language of either of them. I felt uneasy in mind, as my American accent might become the cause of their laughter, although, with Professor Mathews or somebody, I believe that Americans speak a far purer English than the Englishmen themselves. "Where's English poetry?" I not once exclaimed, more or less in condemnation. Happy to be a foreigner sometimes, as he can say anything he wishes, without feeling any responsibility for the creation of a condition he is going to criticise. With that right of the foreigner, I openly expressed my displeasure with London's commercialism, which verily often in the months of winter becomes, glad to say, less forcible, and even attractive, under the veil of fogs. How often I walked by the Embankment in such days or nights with all the justification of my poetical feeling; it is the sadness of the age that we must have a reason even for poetry. As I remember rightly, it