In looking at the churches and the monuments which I saw in London and elsewhere in England, certain resemblances, comparisons, parallels, contrasts, and suggestions obtruded themselves upon my consciousness.  We have one steeple in Boston which to my eyes seems absolutely perfect:  that of the Central Church, at the corner of Newbury and Berkeley streets.  Its resemblance to the spire of Salisbury had always struck me.  On mentioning this to the late Mr. Richardson, the very distinguished architect, he said to me that he thought it more nearly like that of the Cathedral of Chartres.  One of our best living architects agreed with me as to its similarity to that of Salisbury.  It does not copy either exactly, but, if it had twice its actual dimensions, would compare well with the best of the two, if one is better than the other.  Saint-Martin’s-in-the-Fields made me feel as if I were in Boston.  Our Arlington Street Church copies it pretty closely, but Mr. Gilman left out the columns.  I could not admire the Nelson Column, nor that which lends monumental distinction to the Duke of York.  After Trajan’s and that of the Place Vendome, each of which is a permanent and precious historical record, accounting sufficiently for its existence, there is something very unsatisfactory in these nude cylinders.  That to the Duke of York might well have the confession of the needy knife grinder as an inscription on its base.  I confess in all honesty that I vastly prefer the monument commemorating the fire to either of them.  That has a story to tell and tells it,—­with a lie or two added, according to Pope, but it tells it in language and symbol.

As for the kind of monument such as I see from my library window standing on the summit of Bunker Hill, and have recently seen for the first time at Washington, on a larger scale, I own that I think a built-up obelisk a poor affair as compared with an Egyptian monolith of the same form.  It was a triumph of skill to quarry, to shape, to transport, to cover with expressive symbols, to erect, such a stone as that which has been transferred to the Thames Embankment, or that which now stands in Central Park, New York.  Each of its four sides is a page of history, written so as to endure through scores of centuries.  A built-up obelisk requires very little more than brute labor.  A child can shape its model from a carrot or a parsnip, and set it up in miniature with blocks of loaf sugar.  It teaches nothing, and the stranger must go to his guide-book to know what it is there for.  I was led into many reflections by a sight of the Washington Monument.  I found that it was almost the same thing at a mile’s distance as the Bunker Hill Monument at half a mile’s distance; and unless the eye had some means of measuring the space between itself and the stone shaft, one was about as good as the other.  A mound like that of Marathon or that at Waterloo, a cairn, even a shaft of the most durable form and material, are fit memorials of the