s the need
arises. But the lamplighters took to their heels every evening, and ran
with a good heart. It was pretty to see man thus emulating the
punctuality of heaven's orbs; and though perfection was not absolutely
reached, and now and then an individual may have been knocked on the
head by the ladder of the flying functionary, yet people commended his
zeal in a proverb, and taught their children to say, "God bless the
lamplighter!" And since his passage was a piece of the day's programme,
the children were well pleased to repeat the benediction, not, of
course, in so many words, which would have been improper, but in some
chaste circumlocution, suitable for infant lips.

God bless him, indeed! For the term of his twilight diligence is near at
hand; and for not much longer shall we watch him speeding up the street
and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the
dusk. The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he
distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected
it; and the little bull's eye, which was his instrument, and held enough
fire to kindle a whole parish, would have been fitly commemorated in the
legend. Now, like all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis,
and in the light of victory he himself shall disappear. For another
advance has been effected. Our tame stars are to come out in future, not
one by one, but all in a body and at once. A sedate electrician
somewhere in a back office touches a spring--and behold! from one end to
another of the city, from east to west, from the Alexandra to the
Crystal Palace, there is light! _Fiat Lux_, says the sedate electrician.
What a spectacle, on some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of
Hampstead Hill, when in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the design
of the monstrous city flashes into vision--a glittering hieroglyph many
square miles in extent; and when, to borrow and debase an image, all the
evening street-lamps burst together into song! Such is the spectacle of
the future, preluded the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall.
Star-rise by electricity, the most romantic flight of civilisation; the
compensatory benefit for an innumerable array of factories and bankers'
clerks. To the artistic spirit exercised about Thirlmere, here is a
crumb of consolation; consolatory, at least, to such of them as look out
upon the world through seeing eyes, and contentedly accept beauty where
it comes.