Cast up, from myriads of lamps that shine Joanna Baillie. RETURN TO LONDON. ROM the dull confines of the drooping west, FROM To see the day spring from the pregnant east, Ravisht in spirit, I come, nay more, I flie To thee, blest place of my nativitie! Thus, thus with hallowed foot I touch the ground, O place! O people! manners! fram'd to please London my home is; though by hard fate sent Into a long and irksome banishment, For, rather then I'le to the west return, I'le beg of thee first here to have mine urn. Weak I am grown, and must in short time fall; Give thou my sacred reliques buriall. Robert Herrick. LONDON. RANK abundance breeds, In gross and pampered cities, sloth and lust In cities vice is hidden with most ease, Or seen with least reproach; and virtue, taught In which they flourish most; where, in the beams Of public note, they reach their perfect size. Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaimed The fairest capital of all the world, By riot and incontinence the worst. There, touched by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes A lucid mirror, in which Nature sees All her reflected features. Bacon there Gives more than female beauty to a stone, Nor does the chisel occupy alone The powers of sculpture, but the style as much, With nice incision of her guided steel She ploughs a brazen field, and clothes a soil Increasing London? Babylon of old Not more the glory of the earth than she, 'T EAST LONDON. WAS August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited; I met a preacher there I knew, and said, "Ill and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?" "Bravely!" said he; "for I of late have been Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread." O human soul! as long as thou canst so Above the howling senses' ebb and flow, To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam, CROUCH WEST LONDON. ROUCHED on the pavement close by Belgrave Square, A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied; A babe was in her arms, and at her side A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare. Some laboring men, whose work lay somewhere there, Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers; She turns from that cold succor which attends Matthew Arnold. SIR RICHARD WHITTINGTON'S ADVANCEMENT. "THERE is something so fabulous," says the editor of Old Ballads, following Grafton and Stow, "or at least, that has such a romantic appearance, in the history of Whittington, that I shall not choose to relate it, but refer my credulous readers to common tradition, or to the penny histories. Certain it is there was such a man; a citizen of London, by trade a mercer, and one who has left public edifices and charitable works enow behind him to transmit his name to posterity." ERE must I tell the praise HER Of worthy Whittington, Known to be in his dayes Thrice Maior of London. But of poor parentage Borne was he, as we heare, And in his tender age Bred up in Lancashire. Poorely to London than His daily service was Turning spitts at the fire; Of coyne he had no store; |