My Dear Sir - If my English letters have told you mostly of country places, and country life, it is not that I have been insensible to sight-seeing in town. London is a great world in itself. Ink enough has, however, already been expended upon it to fill the Grand Canal, and still it is a city which no one can understand without seeing it. Its vastness, its grave aspect of business, the grandeur of some parts, the poverty of others, the air of order, and the taint of smoke, that pervade it everywhere, are its great features. To an American eye, accustomed to the clear, pure, transatlantic atmosphere, there is, at first, something really repulsive in the black and dingy look of almost all buildings, whether new or old, (not painted within the last month.) In some of the oldest, like Westminster Abbey, it is an absolute covering of dirty soot. That hoary look of age which belongs to a time-honored building, and which mellows and softens all its lines and forms, is as delicious to the sense of sight as the tone of old pictures, or the hue of old wine.

But there is none of this in the antiquity of London. You are repelled by the sooty exterior of all the old facades, as you would be by that of a chimney-sweep who has made the circuit of fifty flues in a morning, and whose outer man would almost defy an entire hydropathic institution.

If I have shown you the dark side of the picture of the great Metropolis, first, let me hasten to present you with some of its lights, which made a much stronger impression upon me. I mean the grand and beautiful parks of London.

If everything one sees in England leads one to the conviction that the English do not, like the French and Germans, possess the genius of high art, there is no denying that they far surpass all other nations in a profound sentiment of nature. Take, for example, the West end of London, and what do you see there? Magnificent palaces, enormous piles of dwellings, in the shape of "terraces," "squares," and "places" - the same costly town architecture that you find everywhere in the better portions of populous and wealthy capitals. But if you ask me what is the peculiar and distinguishing luxury of this part of London, I answer, in its holding the country in its lap. In the midst of London lie, in an almost connected series, the great parks. Hyde Park, Regent's Park, St. James' and Green Parks. These names are almost as familiar to you as the Battery and Washington Square, and I fear you labor under the delusion that the former are only an enlarged edition of the latter. Believe me, you have fallen into as great an error as if you took the "Brick meeting-house" for a suggestion of St. Peters. The London Parks are actually like districts of open country - meadows and fields, country estates, lakes and streams, gardens and shrubberies, with as much variety as if you were in the heart of Cambridgeshire, and as much seclusion in some parts, at certain hours, as if you were on a farm in the interior of Pennsylvania. And the whole is laid out and treated, in the main, with a broad and noble feeling of natural beauty, quite the reverse of what you see in the public parks of the continental cities.

This makes these parks doubly refreshing to citizens tired of straight lines and formal streets, while the contrast heightens the natural charm. Unaccustomed to this breadth of imitation of nature - this creating a piece of wide-spread country large enough to shut out for the time all trace of the houses, though actually in the midst of a city, an American is always half inclined to believe, (notwithstanding" the abundance of evidence to the contrary,) that the London Parks are a bit of the native country, surprised and fairly taken prisoner by the outstretched arms of this giant of modern cities.

with broad glades of turf, noble trees, rich masses of shrubbery and flowering plants lakes filled with rare water-fowl, and the proper surroundings, in fact, to two royal palaces and the finest private houses in London; but still, all open to the enjoyment of hundreds of thousands daily. You look out upon the forest of verdure in Green Park, as you sit in the windows of our present minister's fine mansion in Piccadilly, astonished at the breadth and beauty of the green landscape, which seems to you more like a glimpse into one of the loveliest pleasure grounds on the Hudson, than the belongings of the great metropolis.

But the pride of London is in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, which, together, contain nearly 800 acres, so that you have to make a circuit of nearly seven miles to go over the entire circumference. If you enter Hyde Park between seven and eight in the morning, when all the world of fashion is asleep, you will fancy, after you have left the great gateways and the fine colossal statue of Achilles far enough behind you to be quite out of sight, that you have made a mistake and strolled out into the country unawares. Scarcely a person is to be seen at this time of day, unless it be some lonely foot-passenger, who looks as if he had lost his way, or his wits, at this early hour. But you see broad grass meadows with scattered groups of trees, not at all unlike what you remember on the smooth banks of the Connecticut, and your impression that you have got astray and quite out of the reach of the Metropolis, is confirmed by hearing the tinkle of sheep-bells and seeing flocks of these and other pastoral creatures, feeding quietly on the short turf of the secluded portions of the Park. You walk on till you are quite weary, without finding the end of the matter - for Kensington Garden, which is only another and a larger Park, is but the continuation of Hyde Park - and you turn back in a sort of bewildered astonishment at the vastness and wealth of a city which can afford such an illimitable space for the pleasure of air and exercise of its inhabitants.

That is Hyde Park in dishabille. Now go in again with me in the afternoon, any time during the London season, and you shall see the same place in full dress, and so altered and animated by the dramatis persona, that you will hardly identify it as the locale of the solitary country ramble you took in the morning.