epend almost entirely upon the sky. See them as they glow in the long
unequal curves that follow the subtly misleading directions of the streets
of London, and in all their brilliancy they make but a common show--pretty
enough, but not beautiful. But let any lamp or line of lamps come into
visible relation with the sky--any sky, whether a mysterious night-sky
softly embrowned, or a night-sky swept pure by a west wind, or the most
ordinary grey of any average evening--and the lamp has indescribable
beauties. I have seen a grey blue sky at the earliest moment when street
lamps were alight at all, and radiant against the light grey of its
invisible and equal clouds an electric lamp has been reared: an electric
lamp of cold white light, pure and keen, and armed with intense and
splendid arrows that would pierce day itself. Light grey sky and thrilling
lamp together make--or so it seems to me--one of the most beautiful sights
that eyes can see--the most refined, most severe, and most exquisite. This
carbon electric light is so much disliked because, no doubt, it was
generally seen under the glass and iron of a railway station. Seen with
the sky it cannot but be seen to be most beautiful. The golden
lights--electric lamps or gas lamps--have the beauty of fire, but the
white lamp has the beauty of light. The golden, too, however, cannot be
seen at their best but in one picture with the sky.

London at night has begun, of late, so to multiply her lights that they
make all her scenery. A search-light suddenly draws the eye up to the
chimney-pots (sweetly touched, they too, on the westernmost of their
squalid sides) and to the unbroken sky; and then at once the eye travels
down its shaft, revealing clouded air; and here a puff of steam from some
machine at work on the new underground railway takes colour on its curves.
Or the search-light makes the programme of a music-hall to shine black and
white upon the wall; anon, an advertisement is written in light, and
perpetually among the even progress of the carriage lights flit the lamps
of bicycles. And if, from a heart of glowing lights, you look into the
streets, you find them so filled with blue air that there is evident blue
between you and the houses opposite.

[Illustration: NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY.]

The street-corner tree has always the golden gas and the blue air; upon it
rains a sky that is not seen to darken for rain, and you hear the drops,
silent elsewhere, upon its