| | 1 | Author: | Cox
William
d. 1851? | Add | | | Title: | Crayon sketches  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 | | | | Description: | In few places are the “lights and shadows” of life
more strongly and vividly contrasted than in the
streets of a great metropolis; where bloated wealth
and hollow-eyed poverty trudge side by side, and
gay, fluttering vanity and squalid wretchedness
gaze strangely at each other. It is dramatic, but
unpleasant; at least until custom has produced
the callousness of heart requisite to enable a man
to look philosophically on all human sorrow, save
his own peculiar portion. Before he has arrived at
this state, however, a stroll through the streets of a
crowded city is apt to be uncommonly beneficial.
It generates a series of practical sermons, for which
every poor distressed object furnishes an eloquent
text, tending to inculcate gratitude for his own station,
charity for the miseries, and toleration for the
frailties of others. A back street in London shows
a man a few of the realities of life. To use a pugilistic
phrase, “it takes the conceit out of him.”
I am sometimes sorrier for my own disappointments
than for any person's; and occasionally pity and indulge
in the tenderest and most delicate sympathy
imaginable towards myself, on account of any trivial
inconvenience or privation to which I may
happen to be subjected; but I have never entered
a London by-lane in this frame of mind without
walking out “a wiser and a sadder man” at the
other end.” There is a vast deal of difference between
fanciful or poetical unhappiness and harsh
prose misery—plain, unvarnished, substantial misery,
arising from tangible wants and physical sufferings.
It is too much the fashion of the world
to exaggerate and swell into undue importance
half real and half imaginary mental woes, and to
sneer at and undervalue common bodily evils.
Your young poets and lady poetesses (heaven bless
them!) and indeed all persons of genteel sensibilities,
are continually plunging into the extreme
depths of desolation on what would appear to a
common-sense man rather insufficient grounds.
But going arithmetically to work, it will be a tolerably-sized
grief which produces as much pain as a
prolonged, stinging tooth-ache; and six-and-thirty
hours, or upwards, without victuals, must be almost
as bad to bear as slighted love, notwithstanding the
assertions of sensitive young ladies (who have
chicken at command) to the contrary. Indeed, it
has always struck me that going without a dinner
must be provocative of a vast deal of pathos; and
that it is rather unfair to make such an outcry
about “woes that rend the breast,” while the pangs
and twinges of the contiguous parts of the body, on
a descending scale, are never taken into consideration
by those who have never felt them. If this
view of things be correct—and it is correct—how
much intense suffering does the blessed sun look
down upon every day! Ah! who that has seen
the gaunt, shrivelled frame—the sharpened features—the
bloodless, compressed lips, and sunken
greedy eye which famine produces, but has felt sick
at heart, and inwardly prayed to be preserved,
above all things, from inanition. The omission
of even such commonplace things as victuals,
will, in an astonishingly short time, convince the
most wretchedly romantic youth that ever fell in
love, folded his arms, and turned his face moonwards,
of the excellent properties, moral and physical,
of a beef-steak. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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