do I live here; all this I had to write you, if I wrote at all.

For the rest I cannot say that this huge blind monster of a City
is without some sort of charm for me. It leaves one alone, to go
his own road unmolested. Deep in your soul you take up your
protest against it, defy it, and even despise it; but need not
divide yourself from it for that. Worthy individuals are glad to
hear your thought, if it have any sincerity; they do not
exasperate themselves or you about it; they have not even time
for such a thing. Nay, in stupidity itself on a scale of this
magnitude, there is an impressiveness, almost a sublimity; one
thinks how, in the words of Schiller, "the very Gods fight
against it in vain"; how it lies on its unfathomable foundations
there, inert yet peptic; nay, eupeptic; and is a _Fact_ in the
world, let theory object as it will. Brown-stout, in quantities
that would float a seventy-four, goes down the throats of men;
and the roaring flood of life pours on;--over which Philosophy
and Theory are but a poor shriek of remonstrance, which oftenest
were wiser, perhaps, to hold its peace. I grow daily to honor
Facts more and more, and Theory less and less. A Fact, it seems
to me, is a great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then
at least by the Devil;--neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer
had a hand in _that._

There are two or three of the best souls here I have known for
long: I feel less alone with them; and yet one is alone,--a
stranger and a pilgrim. These friends expect mainly that the
Church of England is not dead but asleep; that the leather
coaches, with their gilt panels, can be peopled again with a
living Aristocracy, instead of the simulacra of such. I must