London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure

								

citizen trees. It is in the avenues and glades of Kensington Gardens
that Night has her way. There amends are made for the common day by a
double mystery. Not a tree is so much as to be known by name; all kinds
sigh together in the dark. The mass is sombre and alive, but betrays
neither leaf nor colour. As violently as the spirit of the woods was
driven away, through all the long daylight, by the sound, the breath, the
blackness, and the stamp and seal of London, which permit nothing
visible--not a blade of grass--to go unmarked by the proprietorship of
this despotic city; so swiftly as the spirit of the woods was hooted and
stared into banishment by day, so quickly, so intently, and in such a
union of multitude does it softly return by night. Solitude comes, the
movement of the forest comes, and remoteness, which by day must be sought
where it abides, comes at a stride to London, and sits in the branches of
the trees. Profound is the forest and august the sky whence the great and
melancholy spirit of the woods comes to restore these daily altered elms.
Look but at the avenue of the Broad Walk at night, as it is seen from its
northern gate. Some midsummer daylight hovers up the sky, but the coolness
and purity of subtle light are subtly mixed with the thin brown that is
the colour of London. A narrow space of this sombre and delicate sky lies
straight between the two masses of the trees, and they are unmarked,
unbroken, by any single branch or twig astray. The symmetry is absolute;
the wide pathway is one faint grey from foreground to distance. Close to
you, two sentinel trees, one on either hand, hold the gateway of the
majestic avenue, and these only are green, on these only shines the
gaslight of the road. These two are among those London trees that never
bathe in darkness. You can see their branches and their leaves, their soft
encounters with the night-winds, and their articulate composure; but you
see none of such things in the high and dark mass beyond, standing also
precisely to the right, and precisely to the left.
By day it is a London avenue, and the grass and gravel are, as it were,
disowned by Nature; but now this rigid pattern of a landscape is visibly
in the heart and centre of Nature and Night. No pilgrimage of days can
take a traveller further than the places he is rapt to by a pause, at
night, where distance and dreams themselves have made the journey.
Or seek the trees earlier in the night; for the trees of Kensington
Gardens are not deprived of the delicate dusk, though the first twilight
has too much of day in it, and the touching restoration does not begin
until the paths are vague and colour is absorbed and effaced by the
influence of the local sky. London passes away from the trees while the
June north-west is still luminous, but barely luminous, and going out so
fast that to watching eyes it seems to flash softly while it darkens, as
though summer lightning were at play under the horizon; then the tender