one—­a sense of pity that anything in the world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say, senseless steel.  What, then, of these great human engine-houses!  Will the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that? or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors?  Who knows?  These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not for a poet, who is too much terrified by such forces to be able calmly to estimate and prophesy concerning them.

Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson’s picture of ’one poor poet’s scroll’ ruling the world, take your poet’s scroll down to Fenchurch Street and try it there.  Ah, what a powerless little ‘private interest’ seems poetry there, poetry ‘whose action is no stronger than a flower.’  In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday morning.  A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.

Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City churches great dramatists lie about us.  Maybe I have wronged the City—­and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.

Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was for me the greatest danger in the City.  Need I say, therefore, that I promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment—­and entered?  How much of that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not tell my dearest friend.

At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith.  There was a might of poesy after all.  There were words in the little yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all.  I held it up.  How tiny it seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron!  A mere flower—­a flower from the seventeenth century—­long-lived for a flower!  Yes, an immortelle.

BROWN ROSES

‘Well, I never thought to see this day, sir,’ said Gibbs, with something like tears in his voice, as he reluctantly plied his scissors upon Hyacinth Rondel’s distinguished curls.

‘Nor I, Gibbs—­nor I!’ said Rondel sadly, relapsing into silence again, with his head meekly bent over the white sheet spread to catch his shorn beauty.

‘To think of the times, sir, that I have dressed your head,’ continued Gibbs, whose grief bore so marked an emphasis, ’and to think that after to-day ...’

’But you forget, my dear Gibbs, that I shall now be a more constant customer than ever!’

’Ah, sir, but that will be different.  It will be mere machine-cutting, lawn-mowing, steam-reaping, if you understand me; there’ll be no pleasure in it, no artistic pleasure, I mean.’