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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY (non-dramatic.) Mr. Ruskin attributes to the circumstance of his having been brought up in London an intense love of the external face of Nature, that he does not think a country-bred child would have had. I, too, born and brought up in a fortress, regard the dewy, rustic lonelinesses with enthusiasm not common in those who have grown among winding, bowery lanes, and copses full of bluebell and lily of the valley. For me, too, in the greyest desolation of Winter, nothing can so- effectually banish troubles, restore health, and reconcile with the mingled good and evil of life, as the loud, hoarse dash of a brown mountain torrent, hurrying from its native peak over shingle and boulder, on its pure, glad way to the sea. But those who live on its banks remain for the most part unconscious of its grand lonely music, and swift, vigorous, perennial beauty. So much for readers of poetry. A similar influence acts on writers of it. Nature---merely as Nature---affects with almost morbid intensity those who have passed their childhood in the arid, unlovely city. Charles Lamb, to whom theatres, and gossip, and jests, and a thousand whim-whams, as he says, had become necessary, speaks with much tenderness of the green crankles that here and there preserved their verdure in the stony heart of the city, like the flowers cherished by our metropolitan poor in their dingy garret windows. He was, he tells us, "in love with this green earth, the face of town and country, the sweet security of streets, the unspeakable rural solitudes." Thomas Hood also, a weakly London child, tells us of "the walk that costs a meal," and finally, it is Keats, the Cockney poet, as he was contemp- tuously styled, who is our great Apostle of that passionate love of Nature and rust...
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