This is the nightmare that haunts you the first few weeks of London. No doubt if you stay longer you get over it, and find London as thrilling as Paris or Rome or New York. But the climate is against me. I cannot stay long enough. With pinched 30 and wondering gaze, the morning of departure, I look out of the taxi upon the strange dullness of Londons arousing; a sort of death; and hope and life only return when I get my seat in the boat-train, and hear all the Good-byes! Good-bye! Good-bye!
Thank God to say Good-bye!
Passage 2
35 On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents - the London-lover has to confess to the existence of miles upon miles of the dreariest, stodgiest commonness.
Thousands of acres are covered by low black houses, of the cheapest construction, without ornament, without grace, without 40 character or even identity. In fact there are many, even in the best
quarters, in all the region of Mayfair and Belgravia, of so paltry and inconvenient and above all of so diminutive a type, that you wonder what peculiarly limited domestic need they were constructed to meet. The great misfortune of London, to the eye 45 , is the want of elevation. There is no architectural impression without a certain degree of height, and the London street-vista has none of that sort of pride.
All the same, if there be not the intention, there is at least the 50 accident, of style, which, if one looks at it in a friendly way, appears to proceed from three sources. One of these is simply the general greatness, and the manner in which that makes a difference for the better in any particular spot, so that though you may often perceive yourself to be in a shabby corner it never 55 occurs to you that this is the end of it. Another is the atmosphere, with its magnificent mystifications, which flatters and superfuses, makes everything brown, rich, dim, vague, magnifies distances and minimises details, confirms the inference of vastness by suggesting that, as the great city makes everything, it 60 makes its own system of weather and its own optical laws. The last is the congregation of the parks, which constitute an ornament not elsewhere to be matched and give the place a superiority that none of its uglinesses overcome. They spread themselves with such a luxury of space in the centre of the town 65 that they form a part of the impression of any walk, of almost any view, and, with an audacity altogether their own, make a pastoral landscape under the smoky sky. There is no mood of the rich London climate that is not becoming to them - I have seen them look delightfully romantic, like parks in novels, in the wettest 70 winter - and there is scarcely a mood of the appreciative resident to which they have not something to say. The high things of London, which here and there peep over them, only make the spaces vaster by reminding you that you are after all not in Kent or Yorkshire; and these things, whatever they be, rows of 75 eligible dwellings, towers of churches, domes of institutions,
【SAT阅读练习题:Reading Comprehension Test 10】相关文章:
★ SAT阅读材料:Learning and Microbes
★ SAT阅读资料:Dopaminergic mind hypothesis
★ SAT阅读练习题:Reading Comprehension Test 3
★ SAT阅读Sentence Completion题型讲解
★ SAT阅读练习题:Reading Comprehension Test 11
★ SAT阅读练习题:Reading Comprehension Test 9
最新
2016-03-02
2016-03-02
2016-03-02
2016-03-02
2016-03-02
2016-03-02