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.

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 dropped about here and there among the gashed ground: the
lane itself, now entirely grassless, is a deep-rutted, heavy-hillocked
cart-road, diverging gatelessly into various brick-fields or pieces of
waste; and bordered on each side by heaps of--Hades only knows
what!--mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought,
and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashes
and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery,
shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen
garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged with
out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure,
indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering
foully here and there over all these,--remnants broadcast, of every
manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and
flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust and
mortal slime.

The lane ends now where its prettiest windings once began; being cut off
by a cross-road leading out of Dulwich to a minor railway station: and
on the other side of this road, what was of old the daintiest intrica