LONDON GHOSTS
I pass the populous houses
In terrace or street or square,
I hear the rattle of chariots
And the sound of life on the air;
And up at the curtained windows,
Where the flaming gaslights glow,
I see 'mid the flitting shadows
Of the guests that come and go,
The paler and dimmer shadows
Of the ghosts of the Long Ago.
Charles Mackay.
Once upon a time, as the charmed books tell, there was a mountain covered with stones, of which each particular flint or pebble had been, "upon a time," a live and sentient man or woman.
The stones lay, with no attribute of life except a power to appeal in such wise to passers-by as to compel them to remain. But there came, one happy day, a beauteous maiden with a pitcher full of the Water of Life, and she, sprinkling the precious fluid over the stones, transformed them again into animated creatures of flesh and blood—"a great company of youths and maidens who followed her down the mountain."
As I take my walks in London-town, I think of that story and long for a pitcher of the magic Water of Life.
For if imagination may trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole, and if, as biologists tell us, the whole of our mortal tissue is unceasingly being shed and renewed, every brick and stone in London pavement, church, inn, and dwelling-house must have in it some part of human greatness; for the flower of Britain's brain and valour, the heroes of her most glorious service and achievement—poets, philosophers, prelates, princes, statesmen, soldiers, scientists, explorers—the greatest of those who have "toiled and studied for mankind," have lived in London.
Milton used to thank God that he had been born in London. Shakespeare acted in Blackfriars and near London Bridge; his wit flashed nightly at the Mermaid; in the shadow of Whitehall, he broke his heart for Mary Fitton; and here he wove the magic of his plays.