It is always to do, by the happily easy
way of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to grow in the
streets--and no streets could ask for a more charming finish than your
green grass. The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless it is
renewed; but the grass renews itself. There is nothing so remediable as
the work of modern man--"a thought which is also," as Mr Pecksniff said,
"very soothing." And by remediable I mean, of course, destructible. As
the bathing child shuffles off his garments--they are few, and one brace
suffices him--so the land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle off
its yellow brick and purple slate, and all the things that collect about
railway stations. A single night almost clears the air of London.

But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of
Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast. To
have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. O
memorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour as it neared
setting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land. The sea had the
dark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect--the dark and
not the opal tints. The sky was also deep. Everything was very
definite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple. The most luminous
thing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to be
white because it was a little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine.
It was still the whitest thing imaginable. And the next most luminous
thing was the little child, also invested with the sun and the colour of
life.

In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the
violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the curious
history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution. On the
scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party.
Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you
consider how generously she was permitted political death. She was to
spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but
to the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests,
social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should,
according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the
tribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins.

Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies, the last and the
innermost--the privacy of