An Infinite Number of Occasional Tables (Les Barker)

I've got an occasional table
There it is over there
You can tell it's an occasional table
Today's its day off, it's a chair

I've got an occasional table
I can't seem to get it to settle
It's all been a bit unexpected
I thought I was buying a kettle

I took it upstairs on the bus
I always get the bus back from town
It was then it turned into a wardrobe
Took six of us to get it back down

I've got an occasional table
But some of the time I've not
I always rush me dinner
You never know how long you've got

I think I might have another
Excuse the element of doubt
It's the kind of occasional table
That's only in when you're out

I thought if I had two they might breed
I really quite fancy a set
But with them both being occasional
I don't think they've actually met

I've got some occasional tables
I'm never quite sure where they are
I'd quite like to have a settee but
So far they've not gone, so far

I think therefore I am
All we believe stems from this
Except my occasional table
Which only occasionally, is

Perhaps there's a parallel universe
Where they all go to live quite a lot
Where they're called usual tables
And only occasionally, not

An infinite number of occasional tables
Would ensure there was always one there
I've got an occasional table
Look, here it is, it's a chair

from Tinkers, chapter 3 (Paul Harding)

It seemed to me as if my father simply faded away. He became more and more difficult to see. One day, I thought he was sitting in his chair at his desk, writing. To all appearances, he scribbled at a sheet of paper. When I asked him where the bag for apple picking was, he disappeared. I could not tell whether he had been there in the first place or if I had asked my question to some lingering afterimage. He leaked out of the world gradually, though. At first, he seemed merely vague or peripheral. But then he could no longer furnish the proper frame for his clothes. He would ask me a question from behind the box on which I sat shelling peas or peeling potatoes for my mother, and when I answered and received no reply back, I would turn around, to find his hat or belt or a single shoe sitting in the door frame as if placed there by a mischievous child. The end came when we could no longer even see him, but felt him in brief disturbances of shadows or light, or as a slight pressure, as if the space one occupied suddenly had had something more packed into it, or we’d catch some faint scent out of season, such as the snow melting into the wool of his winter coat, but on a blistering August noon, as if the last few times I felt him as another being rather than as a recollection, he had thought to check up on this world at the wrong moment and accidentally stepped from whatever wintry place he was in straight into the dog days. And it seems that doing so only confirmed to him his fate to fade away, his being in the wrong place, so that during these startled visits, although I could not see him, I could feel his surprise, his bafflement, the dismay felt in a dream when you suddenly meet the brother you forgot you had or remember the infant you left on the hillside miles away, hours ago, because somehow you were distracted and somehow you came to believe in a different life and your shock at these terrible recollections, these sudden reunions, comes as much from your sorrow at what you have neglected as it does from dismay at how thoroughly and quickly you came to believe in something else. And that other world that you first dreamed is always better if not real, because in it you have not jilted your lover, forsaken your child, turned your back on your brother. The world fell away from my father the way he fell away from us. We became his dream.

Another time, I found him fumbling for an apple in the barrel we kept in the basement. I could just make him out in the gloom. Each time he tried to grab a piece of fruit, it eluded him, or I might say he eluded it, as his grasp was no stronger than a draft of air threading through a crack in a window. He succeeded once, after appearing to concentrate for a moment, in upsetting an apple from its place at the top of the pile, but it merely tumbled down along the backs of the other apples and came to rest against the mouth of the barrel. It seemed to me that even if I could pick an apple up with my failing hands, how could I bite it with my dissipating teeth, digest it with my ethereal gut? I realized that this thought was not my own but, rather, my father’s, that even his ideas were leaking out of his former self. Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to human circumstance, and as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too, were all of these particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes. Perhaps they already were all of these things and my father’s fading was because he realized this: My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected that he was whittling at my skull – no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels. I looked away and ran back upstairs, skipping the ones that creaked, so that I would not embarrass my father, who had not quite yet turned back from clay into light.

from An Enemy at Green Knowe (Lucy M. Boston)

The entrance hall was delightfully enclosing and reassuring, full as always of flowers and birds' nests, the lights relayed from mirror to mirror all down its length, and all the scatter of happy living - secateurs, baskets, books, letters and anything-to-hand lying on the tables.  The coloured stairs led up invitingly, but to get to the attic you had to pass through the Knights' Hall, which, if it had been alone for some hours, had a habit of slipping back to its own century.  However much you loved it, Tolly thought, it always needed a little resolution to break away into its privacy at night.

'You didn't tell us anything about the witchball,' he reminded Mrs Oldknow, to postpone the moment.  'May we see it, please?'

The witchball was hanging from the middle beam of the room nearest the front door.  It was made of looking-glass and had a diameter of about eighteen inches.  The glass was old and the silvering was old.  It did not glitter like modern glass, but reflected in an almost velvety way.  Being round, what it reflected was a spherical room, something difficult to look at because impossible to imagine.  There were no straight lines at all, no right angles.  Floor, ceiling, doors, windows, tables and chairs all curved softly around its shape.  Ping and Tolly, standing underneath looking up at it, appeared to be diving out of it face first, their bodies foreshortened and tapering, like tadpoles.

'You see,' said Mrs Oldknow, 'it reflects everything, even what is behind it, though that for some reason is upside down, which is supposed to be how our eyes really see things.'

'What is it used for, Granny?'

'Is it for seeing the future?'

'It looks as though it should be.  You could easily see strange things in a spherical mirror-room where even ordinary things look so queer.  Something could be there for quite a long time before you noticed it.  Besides, it's always easier to see visions in a glass than in reality.  But I believe it was supposed to keep away demons.  I don't know why.  Perhaps because if anyone had an attendant demon and came anywhere near the witchball they would risk the demon being seen.  You must admit it looks magic enough for anything.'

'You would have to learn how to look into it,' said Tolly sensibly.  'It is difficult to recognize things in it, especially upside down.'

'A demon, if there was one,' said Ping, 'wouldn't like being reflected, even if no one saw.  It might steal some of his power.'

'I'm sure that's right, Ping,' said the old lady.  'Unlike ghosts who want to be seen and use looking-glasses to do it.'

'I suppose that is why you have so many looking-glasses in the hall,'  said Tolly.  'I like the house-ghosts too.  But I think I would be happier tonight if the witchball was hanging in our bedroom.  May we take it up?  I don't want any of Dr Vogel's companions clutching at me.'

Mrs Oldknow laughed.  'Don't tell me you have sold your soul so young!  I am counting on you to be one of the stalwart guardians of the place.  You should be clutching demons by the tail, not they you.'

'Green Knowe doesn't need guardians,' said Tolly, showing in his face how proud he was of it.  'It can't have any enemies.'

'It has enemies and it needs guarding all the time,' said the old lady.  'In spite of all the Preservation Societies it wouldn't be there another five years if we stopped watching and guarding it.  The very fact that it has lasted so long makes some people impatient.  Time it went, they say, without further argument.  The fact that it is different from anywhere else, with memories and standards of its own, makes quite a lot of people very angry indeed.  Things have no right to be different.  Everything should be alike.  Over and above all the rest, it seems to me to have something I can't put a name to, which always has had enemies.  Lift the witchball down, Tolly.  We'll take it up to the attic.  It is wasted in my workroom.  It really is a beauty.'

They carried it carefully upstairs and hung it from a beam.  It was a great addition.  It reflected back Ping and Tolly in their beds, though even when they sat up and waved their arms it was difficult to find themselves in it.  One is not used to seeing one's self feet upwards.

from Pale Fire, Canto Three (Vladimir Nabokov)

And yet
It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed
What mostly interests the preterist;
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
I'm ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newlydead
Stored in its strongholds through the years.

Still-Life (Elizabeth Daryush)

Through the open French window the warm sun
lights up the polished breakfast-table, laid
round a bowl of crimson roses, for one—
a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayed
near it a melon, peaches, figs, small hot
rolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,
butter in ice, high silver coffee pot,
and, heaped on a salver, the morning’s post.

She comes over the lawn, the young heiress,
from her early walk in her garden-wood
feeling that life’s a table set to bless
her delicate desires with all that’s good,

that even the unopened future lies
like a love-letter, full of sweet surprise.

Whalesong (Sophie Stephenson-Wright)

I boom-mumble I bass-blow
I hull-heavy I big/slow
I boat-bump I limpet-skin
I soft-sink I sky-swim
I sea-search I salt-swallow
I bone-backed I fluke-follow
I gulf-cross I listen-talk
I moon-map I wave-walk
I tail-turn I time-keep
I ship-wreck I song-seek
I blue-blood I grumble-sing
I fish-heart I dream king

from Good Wives, chapter 1, Gossip (Louisa M. Alcott)

'Do you know I like this room best of all in my baby-house,' added Meg, a minute after, as they went upstairs, and she looked into her well-stored linen closet.

Beth was there, laying the snowy piles smoothly on the shelves, and exulting over the goodly array. All three laughed as Meg spoke; for that linen closet was a joke. You see, having said that if Meg married `that Brooke' she shouldn't have a cent of her money, Aunt March was rather in a quandary, when time had appeased her wrath and made her repent her vow. She never broke her word, and was much exercised in her mind how to get round it, and at last devised a plan whereby she could satisfy herself. Mrs Carrol, Florence's mamma, was ordered to buy, have made and marked a generous supply of house and table linen, and send it as her present. All of which was faithfully done, but the secret leaked out, and was greatly enjoyed by the family; for Aunt March tried to look utterly unconscious, and insisted that she could give nothing but the old-fashioned pearls, long promised to the first bride.

'That's a housewifely taste, which I am glad to see. I had a young friend who set up housekeeping with six sheets, but she had finger bowls for company, and that satisfied her,' said Mrs. March, patting the damask tablecloths with a truly feminine appreciation of their fineness.

'I haven't a single finger bowl, but this is a "set out" that will last me all my days, Hannah says;" and Meg looked quite contented, as well she might.

Freshen the Flowers, She Said (Mary Oliver)

So I put them in the sink, for the cool porcelain
was tender,
and took out the tattered and cut each stem
on a slant,
trimmed the black and raggy leaves, and set them all -
roses, delphiniums, daisies, iris, lilies,
and more whose names I don't know, in bright new water -
gave them

a bounce upward at the end to let them take
their own choice of position, the wheels, the spurs,
the little sheds of the buds. It took, to do this,
perhaps fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes of music
with nothing playing.

The Green Eye of the Yellow God (J. Milton Hayes)

There's a one-eyed yellow idol
To the north of Kathmandu;
There's a little marble cross below the town;
And a brokenhearted woman
Tends the grave of 'Mad' Carew,
While the yellow god for ever gazes down.

He was known as 'Mad' Carew
By the subs at Kathmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell,
But, for all his foolish pranks,
He was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel's daughter smiled on him as well.

He had loved her all along
With the passion of the strong,
And that she returned his love was plain to all.
She was nearly twenty-one,
And arrangements were begun
To celebrate her birthday with a ball.

He wrote to ask what present
She would like from 'Mad' Carew;
They met next day as he dismissed a squad:
And jestingly she made pretence
That nothing else would do ...
But the green eye of the little yellow god.

On the night before the dance
'Mad' Carew seemed in a trance,
And they chaffed him as they pulled at their cigars,
But for once he failed to smile,
And he sat alone awhile,
Then went out into the night ... beneath the stars.

He returned, before the dawn,
With his shirt and tunic torn,
And a gash across his temples ... dripping red.
He was patched up right away,
And he slept all through the day
While the Colonel's daughter watched beside his bed.

He woke at last and asked her
If she'd send his tunic through.
She brought it and he thanked her with a nod.
He bade her search the pocket,
Saying, 'That's from "Mad" Carew,'
And she found ... the little green eye of the god.

She upbraided poor Carew,
In the way that women do,
Although her eyes were strangely hot and wet,
But she would not take the stone,
And Carew was left alone
With the jewel that he'd chanced his life to get.

When the ball was at its height
On that still and tropic night,
She thought of him ... and hastened to his room.
As she crossed the barrack square
She could hear the dreamy air
Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro' the gloom.

His door was open wide,
With silver moonlight shining through;
The place was wet and slippery where she trod;
An ugly knife lay buried
In the heart of 'Mad' Carew ...
'Twas the vengeance of the little yellow god.

There's a one-eyed yellow idol
To the north of Kathmandu;
There's a little marble cross below the town;
And a brokenhearted woman
Tends the grave of 'Mad' Carew,
While the yellow god for ever gazes down.

Machines (Michael Donaghy)

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsichord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers
And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

In Wokingham on Boxing Day at The Edinburgh Woollen Mill (Sophie Hannah)

Two earnest customers compare
a ribbed and unribbed sleeve.
I wonder what I'm doing here
and think I ought to leave,
get in my car and drive away.
I stand beside the till
in Wokingham on Boxing Day
at The Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

All of the other shops are closed.
Most people are in bed.
Somehow I know that I'm supposed
to find an A-Z.
Somehow I sense I must obey
an unfamiliar will
in Wokingham on Boxing Day
at The Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

I parked in a disabled space
so either I'm a cheat
or a debilitating case
of searching for your street
has started to erode away
my locomotive skill,
in Wokingham on Boxing Day
at The Edinburgh Woollen Mill,

somewhere perhaps you've never been.
I doubt you're into wool.
Even if mohair's not your scene
the atmosphere is full
of your proximity. I sway
and feel a little ill
in Wokingham on Boxing Day
at The Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

The sales assistants wish me luck
and say they hope I find
the place I want. I have been stuck
with what I left behind,
with what I've been too scared to say,
too scared to say until
in Wokingham on Boxing Day
at The Edinburgh Woollen Mill

I tell myself the time is now;
willingly I confess
my love for you to some poor cow
in an angora dress
whose get lost loony eyes convey
her interest, which is nil,
in Wokingham on Boxing Day
at The Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

I find your house. You're still in bed.
I leave my gift and flee,
pleased with myself, not having said
how you can contact me,
driven by fears I can't allay,
dreams I did not fulfil
in Wokingham on Boxing Day
at The Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

Chains are the most distressing shops.
The crop up everywhere.
The point at which the likeness stops
squeezes my lungs of air.
When I see jumpers on display
I wish that I was still
in Wokingham on Boxing Day
at The Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

from 'Hamlet' (T.S. Eliot)

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare's more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic 'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it: his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand: he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouse in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.

from Jane and Prudence, chapter 16 (Barbara Pym)

'Have the Clevelands a young child?' the Canon asked his wife as they drove away.

'I believe their daughter is about eighteen. She is at Oxford, I think.'

'A strange thing that,' said the Canon, changing gear. 'One would have thought there was a child about the place. The soap in the wash-basin was modelled in the form of a rabbit, and there were other animals too, a bear and an elephant.'

'And you washed your hands with a soap rabbit?' asked his wife seriously.

'Certainly. There was no other soap. I wonder if Mrs Cleveland put them there; she seems rather an unusual woman.'

'Yes, there is something strange about her.'

'I think Cleveland is quite sound,' went on the Canon. 'None of this Modern Churchman's Union or any of that dangerous stuff ...' He hesitated, perhaps meditating on the soap animals and what they could signify.

Jane and Mrs Glaze were also talking about them. Jane had thanked her for bringing in the coffee and biscuits at such an opportune time and for providing the clean towel.

'Oh, madam,' said Mrs Glaze, 'but I couldn't find a new tablet of soap.'

'Wasn't there any in the cloakroom?'

'Only the animals, madam.'

'Well, I believe it's quite good soap. I expect the Canon would enjoy using them. Men are such children in many ways.' Though perhaps not all in the same way, Jane thought. He may have regarded them as some dangerous form of idolatry.

'I was hoping he might think they belonged to Miss Flora,' said Mrs Glaze.

'Yes, he might have thought that. After all she is still a child, really.' And yet even she was old enough to enjoy doing Milton with Lord Edgar Ravenswood and to fall in love with a young man called Paul who was reading Geography. Could children do these things?

Nicholas appeared just before lunch and Jane told him of her eventful morning. They had a good laugh about the soap animals.

'I wonder if he will tell the Bishop,' said Nicholas.

'It would be rather ominous if he kept it to himself,' said Jane; 'it would seem as if he considered it rather important, not a matter for joking.'

from Boy, 'Goodbye school' (Roald Dahl)

I was still living in Bexley, Kent, with my mother and three sisters, and every morning, six days a week, Saturdays included, I would dress neatly in a sombre grey suit, have breakfast at seven forty-five and then, with a brown trilby on my head and a furled umbrella in my hand, I would board the eight-fifteen train to London together with a swarm of other equally sombre-suited businessmen. I found it easy to fall into their pattern. We were all very serious and dignified gents taking the train to our offices in the City of London where each of us, so we thought, was engaged in high finance and other enormously important matters. Most of my companions wore hard bowler hats, and a few like me wore soft trilbys, but not one of us on that train in the year of 1934 went bareheaded. It wasn’t done. And none of us, even on the sunniest days, went without his furled umbrella. The umbrella was our badge of office. We felt naked without it. Also it was a sign of respectability. Road-menders and plumbers never went to work with umbrellas. Businessmen did.

from Cranford, chapter V, Old Letters (Elizabeth Gaskell)

I have often noticed that almost every one has his own individual small economies - careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one peculiar direction - any disturbance of which annoys him more than spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance. [...] I am not above owning that I have this human weakness myself. String is my foible. My pockets get full of little hanks of it, picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never come. I am seriously annoyed if any one cuts the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold. How people can bring themselves to use india-rubber rings, which are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot imagine. To me an india-rubber ring is a precious treasure. I have one which is not new - one that I picked up off the floor nearly six years ago. I have really tried to use it, but my heart failed me, and I could not commit the extravagance.

from The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy (John Ruskin)

If it were asked of us, by a single characteristic, to distinguish the dwellings of a country into two broad sections; and to set, on one side, the places where people were, for the most part, simple, happy, benevolent, and honest; and, on the other side, the places where at least a great number of the people were sophisticated, unkind, uncomfortable, and unprincipled, there is, I think, one feature that you could fix upon as a positive test: the uncomfortable and unprincipled parts of the country would be the parts where people lived among iron railings, and the comfortable and principled parts where they had none. A broad generalization, you will say! Perhaps a little too broad; yet, in all sobriety, it will come truer than you think. Consider every other kind of fence or defence, and you will find some virtue in it; but in the iron railing, none. There is, first, your castle rampart of stone - somewhat too grand to be considered here among our types of fencing; next, your garden or park wall of brick, which has indeed often an unkind look on the outside, but there is more modesty in it than unkindness. It generally means, not that the builder of it wants to shut you out from the view of his garden, but from the view of himself: it is a frank statement that as he needs a certain portion of time to himself, so he needs a certain portion of the ground to himself, and must not be stared at when he digs there in his shirt-sleeves, or plays at leapfrogs with his boys from school, or talks over old times with his wife, walking up and down in the evening sunshine. Besides, the brick wall has good practial service in it, and shelters you from the east wind, and ripens your peaches and nectarines, and glows in autumn like a sunny bank. And, moreover, your brick wall, if you build it properly, so that it shall stand long enough, is a beautiful thing when it is old, and has assumed its grave purple red, touched with mossy green.

Next to your lordly wall, in dignity of enclosure, comes your close-set wooden paling, which is more objectionable, because it commonly means enclosure on a larger scale than people want. Still it is significative of pleasant parks, and well-kept field walks, and herds of deer, and other such aristocratic pastoralisms, which have here and there their proper place in a country, and may be passed without any discredit.

Next to your paling comes your low stone dyke, your mountain fence, indicative at a glance either of wild hill country, or of beds of stone beneath the soil; the hedge of the mountains - delightful in all its associations, and yet more in the varied and craggy forms of the loose stones it is built of: and next to the low stone wall, your lowland hedge, either in trim line of massive green, suggestive of the pleasances of old Elizabethan houses, and smooth alleys for aged feet, and quaint labyrinths for young ones, or else in fair entanglement of eglantine and virgin's bower, tossing its scented luxuriance along our country waysides: - how many such you have here among your pretty hills, fruitful with black clusters of the bramble for boys in autumn, and crimson hawthorn-berries for birdsd in winter. And then last, and most difficult to class among fences, comes your hand-rail, expressive of all sorts of things; sometimes having a knowing and vicious look, which it learns at race-courses; sometimes an innocent and tender look, which it learns at rustic bridges over cressy brooks; and sometimes a prudent and protective look, which it learns on passes of the Alps, where it has posts of granit and bars of pine, and guards the brows of cliffs and the banks of torrents. So that in all these kinds of defence there is some good, pleasant, or noble meaning. But what meaning has the iron railing? Either, observe, that you are living in the midst of such bad characters that you must keep them out by main force of bar, or that you are yourself of a character requiring to be kept inside in the same manner. Your iron railing always means thieves outside, or Bedlam inside; - it can mean nothing else that that. If the people outside were good for anything, a hint in the way of fence would be enough for them; but because they are violent and at enmity with you, you are forced to put the close bars and the spikes at the top. Last summer I was lodging for a little while in a cottage in the country, and in front of my low window there were, first, some beds of daisies, then a row of gooseberry and currant bushes, and then a low wall about three feet above the ground, covered with stone-cress; outside, a cornfield, with its green ears glistening in the sun, and a field path through it, just past the garden gate. From my window I could see every peasant of the village who passed that way, with basket on arm for market, or spade on shoulder for field. When I was inclined for society, I could lean over my wall, and talk to anybody; when I was inclined for science, I could botanize all along the top of my wall - there were four species of stone-cress alone growing on it; and when I was inclined for exercise, I could jump over my wall, backwards and forwards. That's the sort of fence to have in a Christian country; not a thing which you can't walk inside of without making yourself look like a wild beast, nor look at out of your window in the morning without expecting to see somebody impaled upon it in the night.

And yet farther, observe that the iron railing is a useless fence - it can shelter nothing, and support nothing; you can't nail your peaches to it, nor protect your flowers with it, nor make anything whatever out of its costly tyranny; and besides being useless, it is an insolent fence; - it says plainly to everybody who passes - 'You may be an honest person, - but, also, you may be a thief: honest or not, you shall not get in here, for I am a respectable person and much above you; you shall only see what a grand place I have got to keep you out of - look here, and depart in humiliation.'

This, however, being in the present state of civilization a frequent manner of discourse, and there being unfortunately many districts where the iron railing is unavoidable, it yet remains a question whether you need absolutely make it ugly, no less than significative of evil. You must have railings round your squares in London, and at the sides of your areas; but need you therefore have railings so ugly that the constant sight of them is enough to neutralise the effect of all the schools of art in the kingdom? You need not. Far from such necessity, it is even in your power to turn all your police force of iron bars actually into drawing masters, and natural historians. Not, of course, without some trouble and some expense; you can do nothing much worth doing, in this world, without trouble, you can get nothing much worth having, without expense. The main question is only - what is worth doing and having: - Consider, therefore, if this is not. Here is your iron railing, as yet, an uneducated monster; a sombre seneschal, incapable of any words, except his perpetual 'Keep out!' and 'Away with you!' Would it not be worth some trouble and cost to turn this ungainly ruffian porter into a well-educated servant; who, while he was severe as ever in forbidding entrance to evilly-disposed people, should yet have a kind word for well-disposed people, and a pleasant look, and a little useful information at his command, in case he should be asked a question by the passers-by?