NATURE AND THE CITY. 319 



and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there 

 through distant streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed in^ 

 and lighted to the due pitch for her ; and only Vice and Misery 

 are abroad : that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber 

 of sick Life, is heard in Heaven. Oh, under that hideous 

 coverlet of vapors, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, 

 what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid ! The joyful 

 and the sorrovk^ful are there; men are dying there, men are 

 being born : men are praying, — on the other side of a brick 

 partition, men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, 

 void Night." 



Readers of Richard Jefferies will remember the 

 terrible experience that Felix underwent in his unin- 

 tended journey toward the imaginary extinct city of 

 London; how he found that all life had disappeared 

 in the limits of its site, that gloom and dense vapor 

 surrounded everything, that the atmosphere suffocated 

 with its loathsome gases whatever living creature might 

 helplessly stray thither, that the stars could not be seen 

 because of the lurid, impenetrable canopy of smoke; 

 and the joy, too, with which, after his canoe had 

 drifted onward and through and past the miasma, he 

 awoke from his stupor, powerless and tottering from 

 the effects of the stagnation, and heard a thrush, and 

 listened to the moorhens and whitethroats again, and 

 watched the swallows tracing their beautiful curves in 

 the pure air, and at last once more lay stretched upon 

 the grass. Well, is that not an allegory of the influ- 

 ence of the city upon the natural life of man? The 

 story of "After London" is perhaps not so imaginative, 

 after all, but is rather the symbolic presentation of a pro- 



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