Highways and Byways in London. Emily Constance Baird Cook

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СКАЧАТЬ Ye ghosts of gods Egyptian,

       If murmurs of our planet come

       To exiles in the precincts wan

       Where, fetish or Olympian, To help or harm no more ye list, Look down, if look ye may, and scan This monument in London mist!

      "Behold, the hieroglyphs are dumb,

       That once were read of him that ran

       When seistron, cymbal, trump, and drum,

       Wild music of the Bull began;

       When through the chanting priestly clan

       Walk'd Ramses, and the high sun kiss'd

       This stone, with blessing scored and ban—

       This monument in London mist.

      "The stone endures though gods be numb;

       Though human effort, plot, and plan

       Be sifted, drifted, like the sum

       Of sands in wastes Arabian.

       What king may deem him more than man,

       What priest says Faith can Time resist

       While this endures to mark their span— This monument in London mist?"—

      It has been objected that Cleopatra's needle ought to have been placed somewhere else; for instance, in the centre of the Tilt Yard, opposite the Horse Guards. But it is, as I said, typical of Londoners to find fault with their monuments; and it is difficult to agree with the writer who described it as in its present position "adorning nothing, emphasising nothing, and by nothing emphasised." M. Gabriel Mourey, for instance, who, though a Frenchman, is also a lover of London, brings it very charmingly into his "impression" of the scene from Charing-Cross Bridge:

      "I go every morning to Charing-Cross Bridge, to gaze on the 'magical effects' produced by fog and mist on the Thames. The buildings on the shores have vanished; there, where recently seethed an enormous conglomeration of roofs, chimneys, the perpetual encroachment of interminable façades, all that insentient life of stones,—heaped to lodge human toil, suffering, happiness,—seems to be now only a desert of far-reaching waters. The river has immeasurably widened, has extended its shores to the infinite. Such immensity is terrible ... the atmosphere is heavy; there is a conscious weight around, above, a weight that presses down, penetrates into ears and mouth, seems even to hang about the hair. We might, indeed, be existing in a kind of nothingness, except for the perpetual passage of trains—trains that shake the floor of the bridge, and jar our whole being with metallic vibrations.... The wooden sheds of the landing-stage, backed by the stone steps and parapet,—with, further on, the thin spire of Cleopatra's Needle, an unimagined network of lines,—appear suddenly out of nothingness; it might be a fairy city rising all at once; here are revealed the gigantic buildings of the Savoy Hotel, and yonder, farther on, those of Somerset House, as the fog gradually lifts; the whole effect is suggestive of a negative under the chemical action of the developer. There is, however, no distinctness; the negative is a fogged one; outlines are only distinguished with difficulty; and everything, in this strange and sad monochrome, seems to acquire a vast and altogether fantastic size. The sky, however, moves; thick, ragged clouds unravel themselves, in colour a dirty yellow fringed with white; they might well be great folds of torn curtains entangled in each other, curtains of dingy wadding, thickly lined, and edged with faint gold. But the light is too feeble to reflect itself, and the water below continues to flow dully, as though weighed down with the burden of that heavy sky; the pleasure-steamers, indeed, seem to cleave it with painful toil, to force a pathway, soon again closed; a pathway of which scarcely a trace remains, only a slow, sluggish undulation, soon lost in the general distracting cohesion of all and everything."

      It may be interesting here to recall Lord Tennyson's sonnet, and the story told of it by his son:

      "When Cleopatra's Needle was brought to London, Stanley asked my father to make some lines upon it; to be engraven on the base. These were put together by my father at once, and I made a note of them:

      Cleopatra's Needle.

      "Here, I that stood in On beside the flow

       Of sacred Nile, three thousand years ago!—

       A Pharaoh, kingliest of his kingly race,

       First shaped, and carved, and set me in my place.

       A Cæsar of a punier dynasty

       Thence haled me toward the Mediterranean sea,

       Whence your own citizens, for their own renown,

       Thro' strange seas drew me to your monster town.

       I have seen the four great empires disappear!

       I was when London was not! I am here!"

      

      The "Top" Season.

      Waterloo Bridge, crossing the Thames at Somerset House, was built by Rennie in 1817. Canova considered it "the noblest bridge in the world, and worth a visit from the remotest corners of the earth." It was at first intended to call it the "Strand" Bridge; but it was eventually named "Waterloo," in honour of the victory just won. Yet Waterloo Bridge is not without its dismal associations. So many people, for instance, have committed suicide from it, that it has been called the "English Bridge of Sighs." It suggests Hood's ballad of the "Unfortunate":

      "The bleak wind of March

       Made her tremble and shiver:

       But not the dark arch

       Or the black flowing river."

       Waterloo Bridge has indeed been the last resource of many an unhappy human moth—attracted by "the cruel lights of London"—to whom

      "When life hangs heavy, death remains the door

       To endless rest beside the Stygian shore."

      Dante Rossetti, who painted his terrible picture of the lost girl found by her old lover on a London bridge at dawning, has well realised the ineffable sadness of the wrecks made by this whirlpool of London.

      The Victoria Embankment, and indirectly also this splendid Waterloo Bridge, have given cause for one of the most eloquent diatribes of our greatest æsthetic critic. Mr. Ruskin, though he cannot but admire the vast curve of Waterloo Bridge, where the Embankment road passes under it, "as vast, it alone, as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in proportions," yet finds, in the wretched attempts at decoration on the Embankment, and in the sad want of "human imagination" of the English architect, windmills apt and ready to his lance. Unlike the Rialto, the "Waterloo arch," he remarks plaintively, "is nothing more than a gloomy and hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite":

      "We have lately been busy," he says, "embanking, in the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis, that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its position and purpose it was the most capable of noble adornment. For that adornment, СКАЧАТЬ