_From the Circus to The Square
There's an avenue of light;
Golden lamps are everywhere
From the Circus to The Square;
And the rose-winged hours there
Pass like lovely birds in flight.
From The Circus to The Square
There's an avenue of light._
_London yields herself to men
With the dying of the day.
Let the twilight come, and then
London yields herself to men.
Lords of wealth or slaves of pen,
We, her lovers, all will say:
London yields herself to men
With the dying of the day._
NIGHTS IN LONDON
NOCTURNAL
For the few who have an eye for the beauty of townscapes, London by
night is the loveliest thing in the world. Only in the London night may
the connoisseur find so many vistas of sudden beauty, because London was
never made: she has "growed." Paris affords no townscapes: everything
there is too perfectly arranged; its artificiality is at once apparent.
In London alone he finds those fantastic groupings, those monstrous
masses of light and shade and substance.
Take London from whatever point you will and she will satisfy. For the
rustic the fields of corn, the craggy mountain, the blossomy lane, or
the rush of water through the greenwood. But for your good Cockney the
shoals of gloom, the dusky tracery of chimney-stack and gaswork, the
torn waste of tiles, and the subtle tones of dawn and dark in lurking
court and alley. Was there ever a lovelier piece of colour than Cannon
Street Station at night? Entering by train, you see it as a huge vault
of lilac shadow, pierced by innumerable pallid arclights. The roof
flings itself against the sky, a mountain of glass and interlacing
girders, and about it play a hundred indefinite and ever-changing tones.
Each platform seems a lane through a dim forest, where the trees are of
iron and steel and the leaves are sullen windows. Or where shall you
find a sweeter pastoral than that field of lights that thrills the
midnight sojourner in lower Piccadilly? Or where a more rapturous
river-piece than that to be glimpsed from Hungerford footbridge as the
Embankment lights and stones surge east and west towards Blackfriars and
Chelsea? Or where a panorama like those that sweep before you from
Highgate Archway or the Islington Angel?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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