THE ROMANCE AND ATTRACTION OF FLEET-STREET.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIV, Issue 8062, 1 October 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE ROMANCE AND ATTRACTION OF FLEET-STREET.

Something in Fleet-street holds tight those who once come within its influence. The cerebellum of the world, the "grey matter" of the world's brain, lies somewhere thereabouts. The thoughts of our time issue thence, like the radiating spokes of a wheel, to all places of the earth. There you hare touch of the throbbing pulse of the vast multitudes that live and breathe. Their ideas come from Fleet-street. From the printing press and the engravar's wood block, the lithographic atone, the etcher's plate, from book and mag&zine, periodical and pamphlet, from world-read newspaper. From Fleet-street, the centre whence ideas flow outwards. It 13 joyous to be in the fiowergrown meads ; it is sweet to be on the hill-top ; delicious to feel the swell and the long roll of the hexameter of the seas ; doubtless there is a wild rapture on the summit of the Himalayas ; triumph in the heart of the African explorer at the river's source. Hut if once the mind has been dipped in Fleet-street, let the meads be never bo sweet, the mountain-tap never so exalted, still to Fleet street the Uiind will return, because there is that other mind, without whoso sympathy snocess is even nothing— the mind of the world. I am, of courie, thinking not only of the thoroughfare Fle&tatrues, but of all that the printing-press means. —" Amaryllis at the Fair," by Kichard Jefferies.