He would lie for hours looking upon distant London --
a golden city of the west literally enough, oftentimes,
when the sunlight came streaming in long shafts from behind
the towers of Westminster and flashed upon the gold cross of St. Paul's.
The coming and going of the cloud-shadows, the sweeping of sudden rains,
the dull silvern light emanating from the haze of mist
shrouding the vast city, with the added transitory gleam of troubled waters,
the drifting of fogs, at that distance seeming like gigantic veils
constantly being moved forward and then slowly withdrawn,
as though some sinister creature of the atmosphere were casting a net among
all the dross and debris of human life for fantastic sustenance of its own
-- all this endless, ever-changing, always novel phantasmagoria had for him
an extraordinary fascination. One of the memorable nights of his boyhood
was an eve when he found his way, not without perturbation of spirit
because of the unfamiliar solitary dark, to his loved elms.
There, for the first time, he beheld London by night.
It seemed to him then more wonderful and appalling than all the host of stars.
There was something ominous in that heavy pulsating breath:
visible, in a waning and waxing of the tremulous, ruddy glow
above the black enmassed leagues of masonry; audible,
in the low inarticulate moaning borne eastward across the crests of Norwood.
It was then and there that the tragic significance of life
first dimly awed and appealed to his questioning spirit:
that the rhythm of humanity first touched deeply in him a corresponding chord.




Chapter 2.