y. Something
of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window
I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and
morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces
bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin
and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night
over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and
infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and
grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What do you make of a case
like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing
to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,--horrible to
angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My fancy about the river was
an idle one: it is no type of such a life. What if it be stagnant and
slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight,
quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and
flushing crimson with roses,--air, and fields, and mountains. The future
of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be stowed
away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard,
and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.

Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the
windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and
the coalboats below, fragments of an old story float up before me,--a
story of this house into which I happened to come to-day. You may think
it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden
flashes of pain or pleasure.--I know: only the outline of a dull life,
that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly
lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those
of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.--Lost? There is a
curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a
lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is
what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed
to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,--here, into the
thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this
story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain
dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist,
or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight p