The gas burns lank and jaded in its glass:

The old Ruffian soon shall yawn himself awake, And light his pipe, and shoulder his tools, and take His hobnailed way to work!

Let us too pass:

Through these long blindfold rows

Of casements staring blind to right and left,
Each with his gaze turned inward on some piece

Of life in death's own likeness - Life bereft

Of living looks as by the Great Release

(Perchance of shadow-shapes from shadow-shows), Whose upshot all men know yet no man knows.

Reach upon reach of burial

These colonies of dreams!

so they feel, And as we steal

Homeward together, but for the buxom breeze
That frolics at our heel,

Greeting the town with news of the summer seas,
We might thus awed, thus lonely that we are —
Be wandering some depopulated star,

Some world of memories and unbroken graves,
So broods the abounding Silence near and far:
Till even your footfall craves

Forgiveness of the majesty it braves.

Scherzando

D

OWN through the ancient Strand

The Spirit of October, mild and boon

And sauntering, takes his way

This golden end of afternoon,

As though the corn stood yellow in all the land
And the ripe apples dropped to the harvest-moon.

Lo! the round sun, half down the western slope —
Seen as along an unglazed telescope-

Lingers and lolls, loth to be done with day:
Gifting the long, lean, lanky street

And its abounding confluences of being
With aspects generous and bland:
Making a thousand harnesses to shine

As with new ore from some enchanted mine,
And every horse's coat so full of sheen

He looks new-tailored, and every 'bus feels clean,
And never a hansom but is worth the feeing;
And every jeweller within the pale

Offers a real Arabian Night for sale;

And even the roar

Of the strong streams of toil that pause and pour
Eastward and westward sounds suffused --

Seems as it were bemused

And blurred, and like the speech

With this enchanted lustrousness,

This mellow magic, that (as a man's caress
Brings back to some faded face beloved before
A heavenly shadow of the grace it wore
Ere the poor eyes were minded to beseech)
Old things transfigures, and you hail and bless
Their looks of long-lapsed loveliness once more;
Till the sedate and mannered elegance

Of Clement's is all tinctured with romance;
The while the fanciful, formal, finicking charm
Of Bride's, that madrigal in stone,

Glows flushed and warm

And beauteous with a beauty not its own;

And the high majesty of Paul's

Uplifts a voice of living light, and calls

Calls to his millions to behold and see

How goodly this his London Town can be!

For earth and sky and air

Are golden everywhere,

And golden with a gold so suave and fine

The looking on it lifts the heart like wine.
Trafalgar Square

(The fountains volleying golden glaze)
Gleams like an angel-market. High aloft
Over his couchant Lions in a haze
Shimmering and bland and soft,

Our Sailor takes the golden gaze

Of the saluting sun, and flames superb
As once he flamed it on his ocean round.

The dingy dreariness of the picture-place,
Turned very nearly bright,

Takes on a certain dismal grace,

And shows not all a scandal to the ground.

The very blind man pottering on the kerb,
Among the posies and the ostrich feathers

And the rude voices touched with all the weathers
Of all the varying year,

Shares in the universal alms of light.

The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires,
The height and spread of frontage shining sheer,

The glistering signs, the rejoicing roofs and spires'Tis El Dorado-El Dorado plain,

The Golden City! And when a girl goes by,

Look! as she turns her glancing head,

A call of gold is floated from her ear!
Golden, all golden! In a golden glory,
Long lapsing down a golden coasted sky,

The day not dies but seems

Dispersed in wafts and drifts of gold, and shed

Upon a past of golden song and story

And memories of gold and golden dreams.

IV

Largo e mesio

Ο

UT of the poisonous East,

Over a continent of blight,

Like a maleficent Influence released

From the most squalid cellarage of hell,

The Wind-Fiend, the abominable

The hangman wind that tortures temper and light –

Comes slouching, sullen and obscene,

Hard on the skirts of the embittered night :
And in a cloud unclean

Of excremental humours, roused to strife
By the operation of some ruinous change
Wherever his evil mandate run and range
Into a dire intensity of life,

A craftsman at his bench, he settles down
To the grim job of throttling London Town.

And, by a jealous lightlessness beset

That might have oppressed the dragons of old time
Crunching and groping in the abysmal slime,

A cave of cut-throat thoughts and villainous dreams,
Hag-rid and crying with cold and dirt and wet,
The afflicted city, prone from mark to mark
In shameful occultation, seems

A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting,

With wavering gulfs and antic heights and shifting