ROADS INTO LONDON
hold of one's identity amid the crash and charge of goods trucks. There are great open spaces all over London where the transfers are made from line to line. At night they are most active. Electric lights glare and seem to drop sparks from very high in the air, blue and mistily; rails glimmer here and there underfoot like marsh pools of water; hooded trucks seem to wander alone and to charge each other in all the black distances. One might be on some primæval plain, watching, in the glare of lightning, to the unceasing crash of thunder, primordial beasts grazing, wandering, or in violent combat. Yet at these things, too, we are apt to shudder, as in his day Horace disliked the Via Flaminia.
Or we cry out: "These things are bringing in the millennium." Perhaps they are. To really descend, not in body alone, but with the spirit receptive, into this whirl and crash, to see men running with set faces, at the continual risk of their lives, that they may link up wagons bringing screws from Birmingham, corn from Canada, pine-planks from Norway, pork from the United States, to whirl oneself in the whirl of it, is to be overcome with convictions. We live in spacious times. Humanity is on the march somewhere, tomorrow the ultimate questions shall be solved and the soul of man assuaged. Perhaps it shall. It is possible in the contagion of these things to see the opening up of Empires wider of sway than Rome, clearer of sight than Greece, kinder of heart than Carthage, purer in joy than was to be had among the hanging gardens of Babylon. Or is this only rhetoric, or only romance?
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