London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure — John Shaqi
London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in PhotogravureMeynell, Alice
General
London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure
Meynell, Alice
London (England) -- Description and travel; London (England) -- Pictorial works
Or if there is an early moon, she is as sovereign a restorative as the
dark itself. She touches the high places of avenues within sound of the
London wheels, and they become as simple as tree-tops at Verona. But,
indeed, the moon is plainly seen to bring this dignity and liberty from
the simple skies. All the world knows her to be like that lady of the
poets who spoke to none that was not worthy, because before she talked
with men she 'knighted them with her smile.' It is one of the tyrannies
wreaked by the electric light and the gas-lamps upon the street-side tree
that they keep away from it the glimpses of the moon. Not only is secret
darkness forbidden, but the secret light is quenched. The tree waves
softly all night in the unaltering lamplight, and the moonlight is killed
upon its leaves.
As to these lights of London lamps, their beauty, which is so great, seems
to depend almost entirely upon the sky. See them as they glow in the long
unequal curves that follow the subtly misleading directions of the streets
of London, and in all their brilliancy they make but a common show--pretty
enough, but not beautiful. But let any lamp or line of lamps come into
visible relation with the sky--any sky, whether a mysterious night-sky
softly embrowned, or a night-sky swept pure by a west wind, or the most
ordinary grey of any average evening--and the lamp has indescribable
beauties. I have seen a grey blue sky at the earliest moment when street
lamps were alight at all, and radiant against the light grey of its
invisible and equal clouds an electric lamp has been reared: an electric
lamp of cold white light, pure and keen, and armed with intense and
splendid arrows that would pierce day itself. Light grey sky and thrilling
lamp together make--or so it seems to me--one of the most beautiful sights
that eyes can see--the most refined, most severe, and most exquisite. This
carbon electric light is so much disliked because, no doubt, it was
generally seen under the glass and iron of a railway station. Seen with
the sky it cannot but be seen to be most beautiful. The golden
lights--electric lamps or gas lamps--have the beauty of fire, but the
white lamp has the beauty of light. The golden, too, however, cannot be
seen at their best but in one picture with the sky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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