u the riddle of our living?
Have you to another been the dark's one ray?_

_Well, if one has held you, and, holding you, beheld you
Shining down upon him like a single star;
If Love to Love leans, even as the June sky,
Laughing down to earth, leans strangely close and far;
Has he seen the moonlight mirrored in the bloomy,
Softly-breathing gloom of your dear dark hair;
And seeing it, has worshipped, and cried again for heaven?
Then am I joyful for a fire-kissed prayer!_

A LONELY NIGHT

KINGSLAND ROAD

Kingsland Road is one of the few districts of London of which I can say,
definitely, that I loathe it. I hate to say this about any part of
London, but Kingsland Road is Memories ... nothing sentimental, but
Memories of hardship, the bitterest of Memories. It is a bleak patch in
my life; even now the sight of its yellow-starred length, as cruelly
straight as a sword, sends a shudder of chill foreboding down my back.
It is, like Barnsbury, one of the lost places of London, and I have met
many people who do not believe in it. "Oh yes," they say, "I knew that
'buses went there; but I never knew there really was such a place."

Many miles I have tramped and retramped on its pavements, filled with a
brooding bitterness which is no part of seventeen. Those were the days
of my youth, and, looking back, I realize that something, indeed, a
great deal, was missing. Youth, of course, in the abstract, is regarded
as a kingship, a time of dreams, potentialities, with new things waiting
for discovery at every corner. Poets talk of it as some kind of magic,
something that knows no barriers, that whistles through the world's dull
streets a charmed tune that sets lame limbs pulsing afresh. Nothing of
the kind. Its only claim is that it is the starting-point. Only once do
we make a friend--our first. Only once do we succeed--and that is when
we take our first prize at school. All others are but empty echoes of
tunes that only once were played.

There are fatuous folk who, having become successful and lost their
digestions, look back on their far youth, and talk, saying that their
early days, despite miseries and hardships, were really, now they regard
them dispassionately, the happiest of their lives. That is a lie. And
everybody, even he who says it, secretly knows it to be a lie. Youth is
not glorious; it is shamefaced. It is a time of self-searching and
self-exacerbat