Sunday noons and afternoons which I have tried to photograph, some
picture of open-air life in the slums. But upon reflection I have
decided that the true counterpart of that scene is to be found any
week-day evening, when the weather is fair, on the grassy stretches
which the Park rises into somewhat beyond the sacred close of high life.
This space is also enclosed, but the iron fence which bounds it is
higher and firmer, and there is nothing of such seclusion as embowering
foliage gives. There are no trees on any side for many acres, and the
golden-red sunset glow hovers with an Indian-summer mellowness in the
low English heaven; or at least it did so at the end of one sultry day
which I have in mind. From all the paths leading up out of Piccadilly
there was a streaming tendency to the pleasant level, thickly and softly
turfed, and already strewn with sitting and reclining shapes which a
more impassioned imagination than mine might figure as the dead and
wounded in some field of the incessant struggle of life. But, besides
having no use for such a figure, I am withheld from it by a conscience
against its unreality. Those people, mostly young people, are either
sitting there in gossiping groups, or whispering pairs, or singly
breathing a mute rapture of release from the day's work. A young fellow
lies stretched upon his stomach, propped by his elbows above the
newspaper which the lingering light allows him to read; another has an
open book under his eyes; but commonly each has the companionship of
some fearless girl in the abandonment of the conventionalities which
with us is a convention of summer ease on the sands beside the sea, but
which is here without that extreme effect which the bathing-costume
imparts on our beaches. These young people stretched side by side on the
grass in Hyde Park added a pastoral charm to the scene, a suggestion of
the

"Bella eta, dell' oro"