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How heavenly to find oneself in this wild clean country! after all the ugly squalors of parade and lodging-house, after the dingy bow-windowed streets with the March dust whirling through them. She leant across the broad window-sill, her chin on her hands, absorbed, drinking it in.
I recall one night at the Church of the Saviour, after his return from a holiday in Rome, when he told us how he had purposely lost himself in the viler quarters of the city. The noon-day sun beat down, eliciting abominable stenches and revealing, without compromise, the ugly squalors of the region.
The world of his creation is not a copy of our own; it is a heightened and rarefied extension of it; moving, in triumph and in beauty, through 'an ampler ether, a diviner air. It is a world where the hesitations and the pettinesses and the squalors of this earth have been fired out; a world where ugliness is a forgotten name, and lust itself has grown ethereal; where anguish has become a grace and death a glory, and love the beginning and the end of all.
He would have preferred a more congenial spot, but, as usually happens, in place of a romantic field or solemn aisle for his tale, it was told while they walked up and down over a floor littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable refuse.
Besides, I made, not forty, but forty- five shillings, under the sliding-scale". "Yes, but no brave nation would submit one day to such petty squalors after it was shown the way to escape them". "There is no way", said the mechanic: "there are the books, and the talkers; but the economic laws that govern the units like you and me are as relentless as gravitation.
In that moment I seemed to see it imaginatively, comprehensively, as I had never, never seen it in all the years of my life in it. I saw its green pastures and moorlands, its mountains and its lakes, its cities and its people, its splendours and its squalors as if it was all a vision projected beyond the verge of the horizon.
The young green of the trees glittered under the gas like the trees of a pantomime; the kiosks threw their lights out upon the moving crowd; shops and cafes were all shining and alive; and on either hand rose the long line of stately houses, unbroken by any London or Manchester squalors and inequalities, towering as it seemed into the skies, and making for the great spectacle of life beneath them a setting more gay, splendid, and complete than any Englishman in his own borders can ever see.
To complain that life is "often more than sad enough, with its inequalities confronting us, its gilded prizes and its squalors side by side, its burdens and its trivialties pressing in upon the soul," as does Marguerite Merington in a late and otherwise excellent magazine article, is to strike a popular chord, but the note is false and scabrous, the philosophy less than commendable.
Two men came running down the street with weapons in hand; and the moonlight, which had lifted until it shone white and clear into the squalors of the camp, picked out dim blazes from the stars on their breasts.
So I tried to think no treason, but with a sigh passed on, keeping my eyes above the miseries and the squalors of the roadway, and sending out my thoughts to the stars which hung in the purple night above, and to the High Gods which dwelt amongst them, seeking, if it might be, for guidance for my future policies.
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