as blind and sporadic as it is at Westminster, unrelated to any fixed
star, lucky to fill the need of the day, building without any distant
design, flowing in bulk through the lowest channels that offered. As
elsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past.
Our part of London, like Kensington or Islington, is but the formless
accretion of countless swarms of life which had no common endeavour;
and so here we are, Time's latest deposit, the vascular stratum of this
area of the earth's rind, a sensitive surface flourishing during its
day on the piled strata of the dead. Yet this is the reef to which I
am connected by tissue and bone. Cut the kind of life you find in
Poplar and I must bleed. I cannot detach myself, and write of it.
Like any other atom, I would show the local dirt, if examined. My hand
moves, not loyally so much as instinctively, to impulses which come
from beneath and so out of a stranger's knowledge; out of my own, too,
largely.

Is that all? Not quite. Where you, if you came to us, would see but
an unremarkable level of East-Enders, much like other Londoners, with
no past worth recording, and no future likely to be worth a book of
gold, I see, looking to the past, a spectral show of fine ships and
brave affairs, and good men forgotten, or almost forgotten, and moving
among the plainer shades of its foreground some ghosts well known to
me. I think they were what are called failures in life. And turning
from those shades, and their work which went the way of all forgotten
stuff before the inexorable tide of affairs, I look forward from
Poplar, unreasonably hopeful (for so we are made), though this time
into the utter dark, for the morning that shall show us the more
enduring towers of the city of our dreams, the heart of the commune,
the radiant spires of the city that shall be lovelier than that dear
city of Cecrops.