He loved the late afternoon, when every artery is
injected and gorged with the multitudinous home-going of the daily
workers, he loved the time of lighting up, and the clustering
excitements of the late hours. And he went out southward and
eastward into gaunt regions of reeking toil. As yet he knew nothing
of the realities of industrialism. He saw only the beauty of the
great chimneys that rose against the sullen smoke-barred sunsets,
and he felt only the romance of the lurid shuddering flares that
burst out from squat stacks of brickwork and lit the emptiness of
strange and slovenly streets. . . .
And this London was only the foreground of the great scene upon
which he, as a prosperous, well-befriended young Englishman, was
free to play whatever part he could. This narrow turbid tidal river
by which he walked ran out under the bridges eastward beneath the
grey-blue clouds towards Germany, towards Russia, and towards Asia,
which still seemed in those days so largely the Englishman's Asia.
And when you turned about at Blackfriars Bridge this sense of the
round world was so upon you that you faced not merely Westminster,
but the icy Atlantic and America, which one could yet fancy was a
land of Englishmen--Englishmen a little estranged.
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