It is night. Calm and unmoved amidst the scenes that darkness
favours, the great heart of London throbs in its Giant breast.
Wealth and beggary, vice and virtue, guilt and innocence, repletion
and the direst hunger, all treading on each other and crowding
together, are gathered round it. Draw but a little circle above
the clustering housetops, and you shall have within its space
everything, with its opposite extreme and contradiction, close
beside. Where yonder feeble light is shining, a man is but this
moment dead. The taper at a few yards' distance is seen by eyes
that have this instant opened on the world. There are two houses
separated by but an inch or two of wall. In one, there are quiet
minds at rest; in the other, a waking conscience that one might
think would trouble the very air. In that close corner where the
roofs shrink down and cower together as if to hide their secrets
from the handsome street hard by, there are such dark crimes, such
miseries and horrors, as could be hardly told in whispers. In the
handsome street, there are folks asleep who have dwelt there all
their lives, and have no more knowledge of these things than if
they had never been, or were transacted at the remotest limits of
the world, - who, if they were hinted at, would shake their heads,
look wise, and frown, and say they were impossible, and out of
Nature, - as if all great towns were not. Does not this Heart of
London, that nothing moves, nor stops, nor quickens, - that goes on
the same let what will be done, does it not express the City's
character well?
The day begins to break, and soon there is the hum and noise of
life.
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