As I looked across the wide river Thames
on this bright afternoon in June, the Houses
of Parliament from water level rising,
its brown-stone Gothic an anachronism,
appearing in these modern times the bastion
of democracy, whose spirit transforms
in stylish splendour everything it touches,
nature and manufacture in sweet chorus,
the embankment gardens blooms and fountain’s
fine spray from a curved wedge of modern sculpture,
there yet occurred reflections on a world
troubled, and the consolation here felt
that overruled these fears, in the providence
of that to be thankful for, resolution.
