City and Everyday Life

I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by abell; she gits up by a bell—everything’s so awful reg’lar a body can’t stand it.

The long mechanic pacings to and fro, The set gray life, and apathetic end.

 

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.

The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them—

In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stage-coach.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

The splendour falls on castle walls

 

Did ye not hear it?—No! ’twas but the wind, Or the car rattling o’er the stony street. On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,

This is Red Hook, not Sicily … This is the gullet of New York swallowing the tonnage of the world.

[ Concluding words of the Barsetshire novels :] To meBarset has been a real county, and its city a real city, and the spires and towers have been before my eyes, and the voices of the people are knownto my ears, and the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps. . . . I have been induced to wander among them too long by my love of old friendships, and by the sweetness of old faces.

The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings—all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

Don't knock the weather nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.

Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system.

 

But most through midnight streets I hear How the youthful harlot’s curse Blasts the newborn infant’s tear And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

The viol, the violet, and the vine.

There is weeping in my heart Like the rain falling on the city. 2

Hell is a city much like London— A populous and smoky city.

To one who has been long in city pent,

Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul-destroying.