a meadow, because a street has a secret. A
street is going somewhere, and a meadow nowhere. But, in the case of
the book called "Hymns on the Hill," there was another peculiarity,
which the King pointed out with great acumen in his review. He was
naturally interested in the matter, for he had himself published a
volume of lyrics about London under his pseudonym of "Daisy Daydream."

This difference, as the King pointed out, consisted in the fact that,
while mere artificers like "Daisy Daydream" (on whose elaborate style
the King, over his signature of "Thunderbolt," was perhaps somewhat
too severe) thought to praise London by comparing it to the
country--using nature, that is, as a background from which all
poetical images had to be drawn--the more robust author of "Hymns on
the Hill" praised the country, or nature, by comparing it to the town,
and used the town itself as a background. "Take," said the critic,
"the typically feminine lines, 'To the Inventor of The Hansom Cab'--

'Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell,
Where twain may dwell.'"

"Surely," wrote the King, "no one but a woman could have written those
lines. A woman has always a weakness for nature; with her art is only
beautiful as an echo or shadow of it. She is praising the hansom cab
by theme and theory, but her soul is still a child by the sea, picking
up shells. She can never be utterly of the town, as a man can; indeed,
do we not speak (with sacred propriety) of 'a man about town'? Who
ever spoke of a woman about town? However much, physically, 'about
town' a woman may be, she still models herself on nature; she tries to
carry nature with her; she bids grasses to grow on her head, and furry
beasts to bite her about the throat. In the heart of a dim city, she
models her hat on a flaring cottage garden of flowers. We, with our
nobler civic sentiment, model ours on a chimney pot; the ensign of
civilisation. And rather than be without birds, she will commit
massacre, that she may turn her head into a tree, with dead birds to
sing on it."

This kind of thing went on for several pages, and then the critic
remembered his subject, and returned to it.

"Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell,
Where twain may dwell."

"The peculiarity of these fine though feminine lines," continued
"Thunderbolt," "is, as we have said, that they praise the hansom cab
by comparing it to the shell, to a natural thing. Now, hear the autho