316 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



woods and fields and the far-away forest life, whence 

 it sprang. 



What is a city? A city is an assemblage of houses 

 close together, with bad air in between them and similar 

 lives inside of them. I ought perhaps to add that the 

 lives are not always so bad as the air. But here is 

 nothing but rows of brick houses, dirty children play- 

 ing in dirty streets, dust, smoke, grime, soot. Where 

 are the flowers, and where is the grass? As I have 

 gone down into the city from the hills on foggy morn- 

 ings, it has seemed as if I were entering into the very 

 darkness of Dante's "Inferno" down, down! smoke, 

 smoke everywhere; dense indistinctness; the horrible 

 smells of slaughter-house and brewery; vapors of what 

 not issuing from every alley ; lights seen dimly glimmer- 

 ing through the murky atmosphere; cries and noise 

 and the rumbling sound of innumerable wheels surely, 

 this is a part of Hades ! 



What a picture, that of a city, in Carlyle's "Sartor 

 Resartus!" Teufelsdrockh is speaking, viewing from 

 his watch-tower the great community about him: 



"I look down into all that wasp-nest or bee-hive, and 

 witness their wax-laying and honey-making, and poison-brew- 

 ing, and choking by sulphur. . . . That living flood, pour- 

 ing through these streets, of all qualities and ages, knowest 

 thou whence it is coming, whither it is going? . . . These 

 fringes of lamp-light, struggling up through smoke and thou- 

 sand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of 

 Night, what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his Hunting 

 Dogs over the Zenith, in their leash of sidereal fire? That 

 stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; 



