Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/56

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
LONDON.
53

particular description of them, which you will get so much better from any statistics of London. Our "woman's sphere," the boundaries of which some of my sex are making rather indefinite, does not extend to such subjects. We yet have the child's pleasure of wonder, and we had it in perfection in passing through an apartment a hundred feet in length, appropriated to cinnamon, the next, of equal extent, to cloves, and so on and so on to a wine-vault under an acre of ground.

I never enter the London parks without regretting the folly (call it not cupidity) of our people, who, when they had a whole continent at their disposal, have left such narrow spaces for what has been so well called the lungs of a city; its breathing-places they certainly are.[1] I do not know the number of squares in London. I should think a hundred as large as our boasted St John's Park, the Park, Washington and Union Squares. Their parks appear to me to cover as much ground as half our city of New-York. The Regent's Park, the largest, contains 450 acres; Hyde Park, 395. Besides these, there are Green and St. James's Parks, which, however, are both much smaller than Hyde Park. I wonder if some of our speculating lot-mad people

  1. A friend has suggested that this censure is unjust in regard toour largest cities, New-York and Philadelphia; that, being built ona limited space enclosed by great bodies of water, our people could not afford to devote building-ground to other purposes. But have they done what they could? What is the justification for the sacrifice of Hoboken? and has anything been done to secure the finement of pleasure-grounds in our smaller towns and villages?