They have abused thee sadly, thou grey Thames, for the filth of thy waters and the fogs which arise from thee. But most unjustly hast thou been abused. At Lechlade where the four rivulets from the Cotswolds join into a river, thy waters are as pure and pellucid as the Alpine streams which spring forth from the glacier. At Lechlade there are no fogs obscuring thy surface; there the air is pure; there art thou romantic and idyllic, innocent alike of the temptations of the world and the vice and filth of the greatest town. For many, many miles further down to Kew and Richmond thou art beautiful to behold, flowing through the emerald green of the meadows and the deep luscious green of the bush, a mirror for the lordly villas and charming cottages which stud thy banks. But most rapidly dost thou rush forward to thy metamorphosis! Most quickly dost thou expand into a broad, grey, elderly man of business. He who saw thee at Richmond will not know thee again at Westminster; and the travelling stranger who only beheld thee between the bridges of the metropolis has not the faintest idea of thy beauties at Richmond. The grey business atmosphere of London has cast its gloom upon thee, as well as on the stones, the houses, and the human beings that inhabit them.
But, whatever the Thames may lose in romance, it gains in the grandeur and importance of its appearance. Its breadth increases with every step. Navigable to the length of 180 English miles, with a tidal rise to the extent of seventy miles, the Thames takes the largest merchantmen to the immediate vicinity of London-bridge; and as the tide is going out it takes them back, without the help of oars, sails, or steam-tugs. Nature has made the Thames the grandest of all trading rivers; it gave it a larger share of the ocean tides than it ever bestowed on any other river in Europe.
At the Land's End the tides from the Atlantic are divided into two distinct streams. One rushes up the Channel, and round the North Foreland into the mouth of the Thames; the other beats against the western coasts of England and Scotland, and, taking a southerly direction down the eastern coast, this tide too enters the basin of the Thames. Hence the tides in the Thames are formed of two different ocean-tides; they are equal by day and by night, and so powerful is the rush of the tide from the North Foreland to the metropolis, that it flows at the rate of five miles an hour.
