The Two Stand In The Fast-thinning Throng

It Was A Foggy Day In London, And The Fog Was Heavy And Dark. Animate London, With Smarting Eyes And Irritated Lungs, Was Blinking, Wheezing, And Choking; Inanimate London Was A Sooty Spectre, Divided In Purpose Between Being Visible And Invisible, And So Being Wholly Neither.

An Observer Of Men Who Finds Himself Steadily Repelled By Some Apparently Trifling Thing In A Stranger Is Right To Give It Great Weight. It May Be The Clue To The Whole Mystery. A Hair Or Two Will Show Where A Lion Is Hidden. A Very Little Key Will Open A Very Heavy Door.

On Summer Evenings, When Every Flower, And Tree, And Bird, Might Have Better Addressed My Soft Young Heart, I Have In My Day Been Caught In The Palm Of A Female Hand By The Crown, Have Been Violently Scrubbed From The Neck To The Roots Of The Hair As A Purification For The Temple, And Have Then Been Carried Off Highly Charged With Saponaceous Electricity, To Be Steamed Like A Potato In The Unventilated Breath Of The Powerful Boanerges Boiler And His Congregation, Until What Small Mind I Had, Was Quite Steamed Out Of Me

Up The Two Terrace Flights Of Steps The Rain Ran Wildly, And Beat At The Great Door, Like A Swift Messenger Rousing Those Within;.

No One Who Can Read, Ever Looks At A Book, Even Unopened On A Shelf, Like One Who Cannot.