This central structure
is the White Tower, and the whole circuit of ramparts and inclosed
edifices constitutes what is known in English history, and still more
widely and impressively in English poetry, as the Tower. A crowd of
river-craft are generally moored in front of it; but if we look sharply
at the right moment under the base of the rampart, we may catch a
glimpse of an arched water-entrance, half submerged, past which the
Thames glides as indifferently as if it were the mouth of a city-kennel.
Nevertheless, it is the Traitor's Gate, a dreary kind of triumphal
passage-way, (now supposed to be shut up and barred forever,) through
which a multitude of noble and illustrious personages have entered
the Tower, and found it a brief resting-place on their way to heaven.
Passing it many times, I never observed that anybody glanced at this
shadowy and ominous trap-door, save myself. It is well that America
exists, if it were only that her vagrant children may be impressed and
affected by the historical monuments of England in a degree of which
the native inhabitants are evidently incapable. These matters are too
familiar, too real, and too hopelessly built in amongst and mixed up
with the common objects and affairs of life, to be easily susceptible of
imaginative coloring in their minds; and even their poets and romancers
feel it a toil, and almost a delusion, to extract poetic material out of
what seems embodied poetry itself to an American.
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