I have no patience with the long-haired persons whose scorn of the common people's drudgery finds vent in lofty exhortations to "fly the rank city, shun the turbid air, breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke, and volatile corruption." By turning his back to "the tumult of a guilty world," and "through the verdant maze of sweetbriar hedges, pursue his devious walk," the Poet provides no remedy for the sin and suffering of human cities--especially if the Poet finds it inconvenient to his soulful rapture to attend to his own washing. It offends me to the soul to hear robustious, bladder-pated, tortured Bunthornes crying out for "boundless contiguity of shade" where they can hear themselves think, when they might be digging the soil or fixing gaspipes. I would have such fellows banished to remote solitudes, where they should prove their disdain of the grovelling herd by learning to do without them. I would have them fed, clothed, nursed, caressed, and entertained solely by their own sufficiency. Let them enjoy _themselves_. Erycina's doves, they sing, and ancient stream of Simois! I sing the common people, and the vulgar London streets--streams of life, action, and passion, whose every drop is a human soul, each drop distinct and different, each coloured by his or her own wonderful personality. I never grow tired of seeing them, admiring them, wondering about them. Beneath this turban what anxieties? Beneath yon burnoose what heartaches and desires? Under all this sartorial medley of frock-coats, jackets, mantles, capes, cloth, silk, satins, rags, what truth? what meaning? what purport? How to get at the hearts of them? how to evolve the best of them? how to blot out their passions, spites, and rancours, and get at their human kinship and brotherhood? All day long these streets are crowded with the great, the rich, the gay, and the fair--and if one looks one may also see here the poorest, the most abject, the most pitiful, and most awful of the creatures that God permits to live. There is more wealth and splendour than in all the _Arabian Nights_, and more misery than in Dante's _Inferno_. Such a bustling, jostling, twisting, wriggling wonder! "An intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too, of colour; flecks of colour champed, as it were, like bits in the horses' teeth, frothed and strewn about, and a surface always of dark-dressed people winding like the curves on fast flowing water."