Lights and Shadows of London Life. 179 



friend became revealed, he continued in a tone of sympathy, " my 

 dear Chalcroft, you are ill, very ill, is there any thing I can do for 

 you ?" 



"Nothing," replied the young man, from whose brow the cold 

 perspiration dropped ; " nothing, I will leave you now ; it is time to 

 prepare for our excursion, I will join you at one. This headache has 

 made me as nervous as an aspen." 



For a space after he had entered his chamber, the victim of feel- 

 ings, which he had not the courage to gauge, bathed his burning 

 temples. " God of mercy," at length he exclaimed, throwing him- 

 self in the despair of mortal anguish upon his knees, "spirit of com- 

 passion and loving-kindness, what mean these strange and fearful 

 visions with which my soul is tormented? Am I the sport of an 

 unreal phantasm, or do they foretell something too terrible to think 

 on? Are they sent in mockery or warning? Oh, for one gleam of 

 light upon the dark dread dream of the past'." 



CHAPTER III. 



London ! where shall he seek his type, who would convey to"such as 

 know thee not the faintest imagination of thee, thou moral chaos ! 

 They who pronounce thee a kingdom within thyself fall far short in 

 their description; thou art the world's alembic! with the essence of 

 all that is rich and rare distilling the venom that is the subtlest and 

 most fatal. Such as compare thee to the wide earth are scanty in 

 their delineation, for where, upon the world's surface, shall man 

 place' himself without creating some social memorial of his home 

 but in thee ? Thou art humanity's ocean ! 



"The track 

 Oft trod, that never leaves a trace behind." 



Thou hast thy cloud and shine : the calm and the tempest. Goodly 

 barques float upon thy waters ; some " from Ceylon, Ind, or Carthay," 

 with Prudence for their pilot, return freighted with that glittering 

 ore whose golden rays " led the first argonauts athwart the deep." 

 Others, with streamers gaily waving on the breeze, launch for some 

 Ogygia of the western wave. "Youth at the prow and Pleasure at the 

 helm." Alike the fate of all. If the precious galleon escape the 

 roving buccaneer and tropical hurricane, if the gay and fragile 

 shallop clear rock and quicksand, lacking the chart of experience, 

 still in vain shalt thou seek record of them, even yet while the foam 

 marks the recent passage of the keel. Thy biographers have been, 

 in the phrase of Newton, " but as youths who pick shells upon the 

 sea-shore." Oh ! a golden atlas shall he construct, whereon shall be 

 traced "the shallows and the miseries" wherewith the voyage is 

 environed ! Thrice blessed the hand that shall erect a beacon upon 

 the syren shores of thy allurements, to warn the heedless wayfarer, 

 lest, in the emphatic language of Holy Writ, " he lose his own soul." 



He who desires to make his page the vehicle of interest and in- 

 struction, let him study life as he shall find it in the metropolis of 

 this country. Eschewing fiction, let him select as his thesis the 



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