threatening arms, as it strains and sweats
beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems
something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something
like a sense of pity surprises one--a sense of pity that anything in the
world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say,
senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will
the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that?
or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of
labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows?
These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not
for a poet, who is too much terrified by such forces to be able calmly
to estimate and prophesy concerning them.

Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's
scroll' ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch
Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little 'private interest'
seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action is no stronger than a flower.'
In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only
a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday
morning. A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.

Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of
Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City
churches great dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have wronged the
City--and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards
away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.

Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was
for me the greatest danger in the City. Need I say, therefore, that I
promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment--and entered? How much of
that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not
tell my dearest friend.

At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith. There
was a might of poesy after all. There were words in the little
yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would
outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. I held it up. How tiny it
seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron! A mere flower--a flower
from the seventeenth century--long-lived for a flower! Yes, an
_immortelle_.

BROWN ROSES

'Well, I never thought to see this day, sir,' said Gibbs, with something
li