Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1887 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

A Plea for Gas Lamps 273
from house to house above the fairway.
There, on invisible cordage, let them swing !
And suppose some crane-necked general to
go speeding by on a tall charger, spurring the
destiny of nations, red-hot in expedition,
there would indubitably be some effusion of
military blood, and oaths, and a certain crash
of glass ; and while the chieftain rode for-
ward with a purple coxcomb, the street
would be left to original darkness, unpiloted,
unvoyageable, a province of the desert night.
The conservative, looking before and after,
draws from each contemplation the matter
for content. Out of the age of gas lamps
he glances back slightingly at the mirk and
glimmer in which his ancestors wandered ;
his heart waxes jocund at the contrast ; nor
do his lips refrain from a stave, in the highest
style of poetry, lauding progress and the
golden mean. When gas first spread along
a city, mapping it forth about evenfall for
the eye of observant birds, a new age had
begun for sociality and corporate pleasure-
seeking, and begun with proper circumstance,
T