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A mighty mass of brick and smoke and shipping,
Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye
Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
In sight, then lost amidst the forestry
Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping
On tip-toe through their sea-coal canopy:
A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown
On a fool's head-and there is London Town!

It is around now, in the early nineteenth century, that a real aesthetic of the city develops. As Schorske says: "Among the truths that they (writers at the time) found was the city, with all its glories and horrors, it beauties and ugliness, as the essential ground of modern experience."

And this is where the Sublime comes in, on the spot, as it were, at just the right moment. The main features of the Sublime Burke describes as Obscurity, Power, Darkness, Solitude, Vastness. And more particularly, for their appropriacy to the city, Burke writes about Infinity, Succession, Uniformity. Here was an aesthetic that lent itself very well to the city; its transformation from landscape features to buildings and streets, from the kinetics of waterfall and glacier to the kinetics of the city was an easy one, potentially, though few writers discerned it. John Lockhard on Edinburgh:

"The Trongate…one of the finest things in all Europe, for the most part of huge black structures, rising on either side many stories into the air."

"Huge black structures" is a purely 'Sublime' image. Similarly Alexander Smith (in a sort of precursor to the urban disaster movie, City of the Plague) describes Glasgow:

"Draw the fierce streams of blinding ore
Smite on a thousand anvils, roar
Down the harbour bars;
smoulder in smoky sunsets, flare
On rainy night with street and square
Lie empty to the stars."

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