Up the Thames - Page 2

awful,
to behold the rare sight of a man thoroughly in earnest, doing his best,
putting forth all there is in him, and staking his very soul (as these
rowers appeared willing to do) on the issue of the contest. It was the
seventy-fourth annual regatta of the Free Watermen of Greenwich, and
announced itself as under the patronage of the Lord Mayor and other
distinguished individuals, at whose expense, I suppose, a prize-boat was
offered to the conqueror, and some small amounts of money to the inferior
competitors.

The aspect of London along the Thanes, below Bridge, as it is called, is
by no means so impressive as it ought to be, considering what peculiar
advantages are offered for the display of grand and stately architecture
by the passage of a river through the midst of a great city. It seems,
indeed, as if the heart of London had been cleft open for the mere
purpose of showing how rotten and drearily mean it had become. The shore
is lined with the shabbiest, blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be
imagined, decayed warehouses with blind windows, and wharves that look
ruinous; insomuch that, had I known nothing more of the world's
metropolis, I might have fancied that it had already experienced the
downfall which I have heard commercial and financial prophets predict for
it, within the century. And the muddy tide of the Thames, reflecting
nothing, and hiding a million of unclean secrets within its breast,--a
sort of guilty conscience, as it were, unwholesome with the rivulets of
sin that constantly flow into it,--is just the dismal stream to glide by
such a city. The surface, to be sure, displays no lack of activity,
being fretted by the passage of a hundred steamers and covered with a
good deal of shipping, but mostly of a clumsier build than I had been
accustomed to see in the Mersey: a fact which I complacently attributed
to the smaller number of American clippers in the Thames, and the less
prevalent influence of American example in refining away the
broad-bottomed capacity of the old Dutch or English models.

About midway between Greenwich and London Bridge, at a rude landing-place
on the left bank of the river, the steamer rings its bell and makes a
momentary pause in front of a large circular structure, where it may be
worth our while to scramble ashore. It indicates the locality of one of
those prodigious practical blunders that would supply John Bull with a
topic of inexhaustible ridicule, if his cousin Jonathan had committed
them, but of which he himself perpetrates ten to our one in the mere
wantonness of wealth that lacks better employment. The circular building
covers the entrance to the Thames Tunnel, and is surmounted by a dome of
glass, so as to throw daylight down into the great