IN LONDON AND THE SUBURBS 119 



and the grit. ' The noise wearying the mind to a state 

 of drowsy narcotism, you become chloroformed through 

 the sense of hearing, a condition of dreary resignation 

 and uncomfortable ease '; and when he had had too much 

 of it, he saw the faces of the crowd ' not quite human in 

 their eager and intensely concentrated haste ' on a wet 

 night. The ' gritty dust, too, it settles in the nostrils 

 and on the lips,' was especially horrible to him, and he 

 has reflected this horror in ' Amaryllis ' and in ' The 

 Dewy Morn,' where the grit on the papers and in the ink 

 has almost a ghostly effect. 



Some years later Jefferies lived for a short time at 

 Eltham (14, Victoria Road), and used to enter town by 

 the London, Chatham and Dover railway-station at 

 London Bridge. The red-tiled Bermondsey roofs pleased 

 him as he saw them from the train. He liked to see the 

 vastness at once, which was impossible by the road. 

 ' Nowhere else is there an entrance to a city like this.' 

 From Bermondsey he saw the masts of ships. ' Masts 

 are always dreamy to look at,' he wrote ; ' they speak a 

 romance of the sea, of unknown lands, of distant forests 

 aglow with tropical colours and abounding with strange 

 forms of life. In the hearts of most of us there is alwa^^s a 

 desire for something beyond experience. Hardly any of us 

 but have thought, " Some day I will go on a long voyage." 

 But the years go by, and still we have not sailed.' At 

 the same time as Stevenson, and without mere fancy, he 

 discovered the romantic in London. He loved the docks, 

 and his great red bowsprit of an Australian clipper is 

 an enduring London vision. ' If,' he asked — ' if Italian 

 painters had had such things as these to paint, if poets 

 of old time had had such things as these to sing, do you 

 imagine they would have been contented with crank 

 caravels and tales twice told already ? They had eyes 

 to see that which was around them. Open your eyes and 

 see those things which are around us at this hour.' Nor 

 was this a skin-deep idea. Sun and river and wind 

 overcame the grit. The colour of the Horse Guards and 



