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FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.

1.[37]

1. On the first mild--or, at least, the first bright--day of March, in
this year, I walked through what was once a country lane, between the
hostelry of the Half-moon at the bottom of Herne Hill, and the secluded
College of Dulwich.

In my young days, Croxsted Lane was a green byroad traversable for some
distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part,
little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by
blackberry hedges from the better-cared-for meadows on each side of it:
growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring a
primrose or two--white archangel--daisies plenty, and purple thistles in
autumn. A slender rivulet, boasting little of its brightness, for there
are no springs at Dulwich, yet fed purely enough by the rain and morning
dew, here trickled--there loitered--through the long grass beneath the
hedges, and expanded itself, where it might, into moderately clear and
deep pools, in which, under their veils of duckweed, a fresh-water shell
or two, sundry curious little skipping shrimps, any quantity of tadpoles
in their time, and even sometimes a tittlebat, offered themselves to my
boyhood's pleased, and not inaccurate, observation. There, my mother and
I used to gather the first buds of the hawthorn; and there, in after
years, I used to walk in the summer shadows, as in a place wilder and
sweeter than our garden, to think over any passage I wanted to make
better than usual in _Modern Painters_.

So, as aforesaid, on the first kindly day of this year, being thoughtful
more than usual of those old times, I went to look again at the place.

2. Often, both in those days, and since, I have put myself hard to it,
vainly, to find words wherewith to tell of beautiful things; but beauty
has been in the world since the world was made, and human language can
make a shift, somehow, to give account of it, whereas the peculiar
forces of devastation induced by modern city life have only entered the
world lately; and no existing terms of language known to me are enough
to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin, that varied
themselves along the course of Croxsted Lane. The fields on each side of
it are now mostly dug up for building, or cut through into gaunt corners
and nooks of blind ground by the wild crossings and concurrencies of
three railroads. Half a dozen handfuls of new cottages, with Doric
doors, are d