the cold, London the blind, London the cruel! I am here at last. I
am here to be tested, to be proved, to be worn proudly, as a
favorite and costly jewel is worn, or to be flung aside scornfully
or dropped stealthily to--the devil! And I love it so this great
London! I am ready to swear no one ever loved it so before! The
smokier it is, the dirtier, the dingier, the better. The oftener it
rains the better. The more whimsical it is, the more fickle, the
more credulous, the more self-sufficient, the more self-existent,
the better. Nothing that it can do, nothing that it can be, can
change my love for it, great cruel London!

But to be cruel to _me_, to be fickle to _me_, to be deaf to _me_, to
be blind to _me_! Would I change then? I might. As yet it does not
know me. I pass through its streets, touching here a bit of old
black wall, picking there an ivy leaf, and it knows me not. It is
holy ground to me. It is the mistress whose hand alone I as yet dare
to kiss. Some day I shall possess the whole, and I shall walk with
the firm and buoyant tread of the accepted, delighted lover. Only
to-day I am nobody. I am crowded out. Yet there are moments when the
mere joy of being in England, of being in London, satisfies me. I
have seen the sunbeam strike the glory along the green. I know it is
an English sky above me, all change, all mutability. No steady
cloudless sphere of blue but ever-varying glories of white piled
cloud against the gray. Listen to this. I saw a primrose--the first
I had ever seen--in the hedge. They said "Pick it." But I did not.
I, who had written there years ago,--


I never pulled a primrose, I,
But could I know that there may lie