Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
England: Vols. I–IV. 1876–79.
Piccadilly
By Letitia Elizabeth Landon (18021838)T
It kindles those old towers,
Where England’s noblest memories meet,
Of old historic hours.
Tradition’s giant fane,
Whereto a thousand years are linked
In one electric chain.
First steals upon the skies,
And, shadowed by the fallen night,
The sleeping city lies.
Touched by the first cold shine;
Vast, vague, and mighty as the past,
Of which it is the shrine.
Around the sculptured stone,
Giving a softness to the walls,
Like love that mourns the gone.
The human heart can know,
The mourning over those gone hence
To the still dust below.
Have vanished from the scene;
The pale lamps gleam with spirit ray
O’er the park’s sweeping green.
The moon’s calm smile above,
Seems as it lulled life’s toil and wrath
With universal love.
The city is alive;
It is the busy hour of noon,
When man must seek and strive.
Is on the waking brow;
Labor and care, endurance, strife,
These are around him now.
Its tumult and its throng,
The hurrying of the thousand feet
That bear life’s cares along.
With such a scene beside;
All sounds in one vast murmur melt
The thunder of the tide.
Upon another’s face:
The present is an open book
None read, yet all must trace.
His daily bread to find;
The rich man has yet wearier chase,
For pleasure ’s hard to bind.
For which they live so fast,—
What doth the present but amass
The wealth that makes the past?
That glimmer o’er our head;
Not from the present is their fires,
Their light is from the dead.
Were waste of toil and mind
But for those long and glorious hours
Which leave themselves behind.