SONGS OF LONDON TOWN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2913, 12 January 1910, Page 85

SONGS OF LONDON TOWN.

By jEssxii Mack ay. 11.

Go where we may —rest where we will, Eternal London haunts us still. —Thomas Moore. London is a city oi ghosts, yet not ghostly as Rome i,s ghostly. Its spectres are like the stars hi daylight, invisible, unrecked of, so long as you stand on common earth ; but go down into the shadowed wells of the spirit, look up, and they are there. How curiously, how tenderly, did the soul of Dickens go out to London’s forgotten dead! —lane and court and temple gave back to him the pitiful tragedies of obscure and perished men. Yet he did not go back any distance ; a century covered his widest sweep of retrospect. A farther and a loftier _ retrospect is shown in these simple lines of Charles Mackay : Whene’er through Gray’s Inn porch I stray I meet a spirit hy the way; He wanders with me all alone, And talks with me in undertone. The crowd is busy seeking gold; It cannot see what I behold ; I and the spirit pass along, Unknown, unnoticed in the throng. The dull brick houses of the square. The bustle of the thoroughfare, The sounds, the sights, the crush of men Are present, but forgotten then. I see them, but I heed them not; I hear, but silence clothes the spot; All voices die upon my brain Except the spirit’s in the lane. He breathes to me his < burning thought; He utters words with ‘wisdom fraught; He tells me truly what I am — I walk with mighty Verulam. meet another spirit there, A blind old man with forehead, fair, Who ever walks the right-hand side Towards the fountain of St. Bride. He hath no need of common eyes; He sees the fields of Paradise; He sees and pictures unto mine A gorgeous vision, most divine. Yet it is the spell of the present, not of the past, that breathes through modern London poetry. Of that poetry, many of the most passionate rhymes have oeen written by women. There is a pathetic lilt in these lines of an unknown singer, Lilian Street: You must come back to London if you were London-bred, It calls you, though your place be filled, and •all your chances dead: You must come back to London to smell its | murky air, | And hear its roar, and feel its throb, 'and j pace its streets nflare. Though all your dreams be over, and yon have naught beside, Grey London’s heart is beating still with London’s mighty pride. And! it is London, London! your home, though you have none, And you must needs return, true son, before your life be done! The same motive is elaborated by Alice Da ere Mackay in her “ Song of the London Man ” : But London, London, London! who ne’er bath dwelt with thee. Hath never touched the Centre where the Tides of Life are Met — Hath never heard the blood beat in the heart of things that be, Bath never known the fever that the soul may ne’er forget! But London, London, London! thy sorcery still enthralls, Though I know thee like a woman with a. veiled and double face! Thy glittering eyes seem beauteous all ere yet the Yasmak 'falls, But when the veil is lifted, thy lovers sadly trace One-hall of thee a hideous hag—a misery : that appals! The other half a brilliant queen of gladness and of grace! And London, London, London! I take thee as thou art, With all the glory and the shame that are •', of thee- a part! .... I have gazed on scenes of beauty, I have dwelt where beauty dwells, Where the blue ocean reaches to lave its golden beaches, And all its music tells to the silvery dust ; of shells On the low strand that beseeches; Where it breaks in dimpling smiles round the fretted coral isles, Or to prove them still unshaken all its ' crested waves doth waken, : i. f To dash a foamy whiteness o’er .the rosy-; tinted brightness, Or the pearly-gleamsug heairty of the coral citadels. But London, London, London! X have oome bade to thee, ■ . ■. *. :i«oU hot: From the magio of the moonlight and the saystery of the teal ~o p--. ..

Th«--re is a spell thou wi eldest— a- charm . i thou hast for me, — 'Tin the throbbing of the pulses in the heart of things that be! : Rosamund Harriott Watson also has London in her heart, as she sings: ; sth sun's on the pavement, : : -,. Trie current comes End goes, \ And the grey streets of London, . . J They blossom like the rose. ■ . ..... * ■-The bluebells m&y beckon, j The cuckoo call—and yet The grey streets cf London I i: I never may forget. And the green country meadows Are fresh and fine to see, But the grey streets of London •.;' They're all the wosld to me. :ArA here, in this October song, she varies her theme, without changing the burden of it : Thine are our hearts, beloved City of Mist, Writpped in thy veils of opal and amethyst, Set in thy shrine of lapis lazuli, : Dovtered with the very language of the sea, Lit -with a million gems of living fire— London, the goal of many a. soul's desire! Goddess and sphinx, thou hold'st us safe in thrall Here while the dead leaves fall. Far different is the rough-hewn granite of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse in "Aurora Leigh," where she describes a poet's life in the metropolis: So, -happy, and unafraid of solitude, I worked the short days out,—and watched the sun On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons, Like some Druidic idol's fiery brass, ■ With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat, In which the blood of wretches pent inside Seemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air, — Push out through fog with his dilated disk, And startle the slant roofs and chimneypots With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog, Involve the passive city, strangle it Alive, a>nd draw it off into the void, Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge Had wiped out London. . . . But sit in London, at the day's decline, And view the city perish in the mist Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Bed Sea The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host, Sucked down and choked to silence—then, surprised By a sudden sense of vision and of tune. You feel as conquerors though you did not fight, And you and Israel's other singing girls, Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose. One poet-paradox, on the face of it, meets us here. Tennyson was England's very laureate; he breathed the proper vital air of England, triumphantly sedate, established on custom, pillared on precedent. And yet he has not a tender word for " this world's hugest," as he tersely calls the city which crowned the England of his love. In "In Memoriam" he glances despairingly at the house which was"the city home of Arfchwr Hallani: Dark house, by which once more I stand, Here in the " long unlovely street: Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand! • • • • »■;■■• He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly through the dazzling rain On the bald street breaks the 'blank day. It is only the untried youth, fresh from country fields, he can picture as longing for the mighty city, as he fares forward 1 : And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn; Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn: And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then. Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men. But Tennyson himself speaks in the agony of Maud's mad lover: My heart is a handful of dust, And the ".wheels go over my head, _ And my bones are shaken with pain. For into a shallow grave they are thrust Only a yard beneath the street! Nevor an end to the -stream of passing feet, Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying. Clamour and rumble, and ringing aid clatter! (To be continued.)