When London was a little town Lean by the river's marge, The poet paced it with a frown, He thought it very large. He loved bright ship and pointing steeple And bridge with houses loaded And priests and many-coloured people ... But ah, they were not woaded! Not all the walls could shed the spell Of meres and marshes green, Nor any chaffering merchant tell The beauty that had been: The crying birds at fall of night, The fisher in his coracle, And grim on Ludgate's windy height, An oak-tree and an oracle. Sick for the past his hair he rent And dropt a tear in season; If he had cause for his lament We have much better reason. For now the fields and paths he knew Are coffined all with bricks, The lucid silver stream he knew Runs slimy as the Styx; North and south and east and west, Far as the eye can travel, Earth with a sombre web is drest That nothing can unravel. And we must wear as black a frown, Wail with as keen a woe That London was a little town Five hundred years ago. * * * * * Yet even this place of steamy stir, This pit of belch and swallow, With chrism of gold and gossamer The elements can hallow. I have a room in Chancery Lane, High in a world of wires, Whence fall the roofs a ragged plain Wooded with many spires. There in the dawns of summer days I stand in adoration, While London's robed in rainbow haze And gold illumination. The wizard breezes waft the rays Shot by the waking sun, A myriad chimneys softly blaze, A myriad shadows run. Round the wide rim in radiant mist The gentle suburbs quiver, And nearer lies the shining twist Of Thames, a holy river Left and right my vision drifts, By yonder towers I linger, Where Westminster's cathedral lifts Its belled Byzantine finger, And here against my perchèd home Where hold wise converse daily The loftier and the lesser dome, St. Paul's and the Old Bailey. ECHOES There is a far unfading city Where bright immortal people are; Remote from hollow shame and pity, Their portals frame no guiding star But blightless pleasure's moteless rays That follow their footsteps as they dance Long lutanied measures through a maze Of flower-like song and dalliance. There always glows the vernal sun, There happy birds for ever sing, There faint perfumèd breezes run Through branches of eternal spring; There faces browned and fruit and milk And blue-winged words and rose-bloomed kisses In galleys gowned with gold and silk Shake on a lake of dainty blisses.