Certain corners of streets, certain angles of buildings, the spray of dishevelled plane-trees, certain cloud-forms, gusts of white smoke, odours, familiar sounds—these, in their remembrance will wring his heart. He will have noticed them, or hardly noticed them, glancing aside in his moments of terror, of perplexity, of passion, of grief. And the remembrance of them, a long way away, will bring up again, tempered by the glamour of memory, by the romance of old days, the reflection of those griefs, of those terrors, of those old piteousnesses.
For London is before all things an incomparable background; it is always in the right note, it is never out of tone. A man may look down out of dim windows upon the slaty, black, wet misery of a squalid street, upon a solitary flickering lamp that wavers a sooty light upon a solitary, hurrying passer's umbrella. He may have received a moment before the first embrace of a woman, or a moment before his doctor may have told him that he is not very long for this world. He will stand looking down; and a sudden consonance with his mood, of overwhelming and hardly comprehensible joy, of overwhelming and hardly fathomable pain, a sudden significance will be there in the black wet street, in the long wavering reflections on the gleaming paving-stones, in the engrossed hurry of the passer-by. It will become, intimately and rightly, the appropriate background for a beginning of, or for a farewell from life—for the glow of a commenced love or for the dull pain of a malady ending only in death.
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