Street

“ He walked through street after street, almost sobbing with delight, through narrow alleys down which the sun never fell, into big squares hot as ovens and dazzling, up hill and down hill, past ragged slums, past the splendid palaces of the rich, past shops, past taverns. ”

“ I remember walking down a long narrow street, at the end of which the sky hung like a tapestry, splendid with the colours of the sunset: a street all clamour and business and bustle, as Roman streets are apt to be when there is a touch of the tramontano on the air. ”

“ The street is broad, the shops are spacious, the noise of passing vehicles, the footsteps of a perpetual stream of people—all the busy sounds of traffic, resound in it from morn to midnight, but the streets around are mean and close ”

“ All the past is in this one street,—a street built up through many centuries, a narrow, dim, disfigured street with an infinite number of twists where each man in building his house had jutted out or left a corner or made an angle to suit his own taste, regardless of level, height or regularity,—a street rich in uncalculated combinations of lines, with a veritable wealth of whimsical details, with so many, many chance effects that on every visit it offers to the student something new. ”

“ At that hour the brilliant merry little street would be filling, between its walls of blazing windows, across the breadth of its asphalte road, with a stream of men and women; men of fine carriage and women with splendid eyes ”

“ OUR STREET In our street, the main street Running thro' the town, You see a lot of busy folk Going up and down: Bag men and basket men, Men with loads of hay, Buying things and selling things And carting things away. ”

“ Street sounds come surging up to us—the hoarse Voice of the City—a confused blur of noise—clanging trolley-cars, rumbling wagons, and familiar cries—all the varied commotion of the home-going hour when the city's buildings are pouring forth their human tide of laborers into the clogged arteries. ”

“ The street itself, to be sure, is commonplace enough, and hot, dusty, and disagreeable; but if you look above it, or on either side, there are green hills descending abruptly down, and softened with woods, amid which are seen villas, cottages, castles; and beyond the river is a line of crags, perhaps three hundred feet high, clothed with shrubbery in some parts from top to bottom, but in other places presenting a sheer precipice of rock, over which tumbles, as it were, a cascade of ivy and creeping plants. ”

“ Silently the light stole along the street like the touch of an angel's wing, while the footsteps that sounded sharply on the smooth pavement told that rest comes late to many of earth's toiling ones in the busy town. ”

“ Their thoughts, too, fought with the wise, just spirit of the Street, so that the Street pined silently as its houses fell into decay, and its trees died one by one, and its rose-gardens grew rank with weeds and waste. But it felt a stir of pride one day when again marched forth young men, some of whom never came back. ”

“ It is Fancy Street—Poetry Street—Imagination Street—the street where lovely ladies look from balconies, where cavaliers strike mandolins and draw swords and engage, where long processions pass, and venerable hermits, with long beards, bless the kneeling people: where the rude soldiery, swaggering through the place with flags and halberts, and fife and dance, seize the slim waists of the daughters of the people, and bid the pifferari play to their dancing. ”

“ Street is the most gloomy and melancholy that can well be imagined; and a walk along its deserted pavements is sufficient to give any one the blue devils for a week. Queen Street is longer, but not a whit more lively ”

“ In the streets people do not live, stare, talk, stand or sit; they merely rush through the streets. Here the street is not the most interesting of places, where a thousandfold spectacle meets your gaze, and where a thousand adventures address themselves to you ”

“ Why nobody sees, or thinks, that the street is covered with such beautiful things—the street and the fields and the houses; people only think it is snow, and that's all; when it is just little wonders of beauty, of a great many sorts too. ”

“ In the mornings I loved to move in the aimless street’s procession, watching the faces come near to me, with the sudden glance of dark eyes, watching the mouths of the women blossom with talk as they passed, watching the subtle movements of the shoulders of men beneath their coats, and the naked warmth of their necks that went glowing along the street. ”

“ Every few steps, as you go, you see some little court or alley boring toward it through the close-pressed houses. It is full of that delightful element of the crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen, which, to American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, is the striking feature of European street scenery. ”

“ Enough of the town: the streets are narrow, hot, and dusty; the day, too, advances; but the gardens are yet cool. So we dash at a venture through a labyrinth of byways and crossways till we find ourselves in the wide street that runs immediately along but inside the walls. ”

“ Few of us see through the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong to the street only—the street-walker or the street arab, the nomads who, generation after generation, have kept their ancient secrets in the full blaze of the sun. ”

“ Every single feature on which one depends nowadays was absent, or, if present, present only in embryo,—visible street-names, printed suggestions other than historical, detailed plans, the wide, straight streets which allow the mystified to discover his whereabouts without climbing a church-tower. ”

“ When love's light falls into some corner of the street, it falls at an early hour of this mean life, and is itself but a dusty ray. It falls early, because it is the sole bright thing which the street sees, and is watched for and counted on. Lads and lasses, awkwardly arm in arm, go pacing up and down this street, before the natural interest in marbles and doll's houses would have left them in a brighter place. ”

“ Can it be that the thronged street of a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude,—over those soft heaps of the decaying tree-trunks, and through the swampy places, green with water-moss, and penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great trees, which have been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? ”

“ You must know, reader, that King street is our Boulevard of fashion; and though not the handsomest street in the world, nor the widest, nor the best paved, nor the most celebrated for fine edifices, we so cherish its age and dignity that we would not for the world change its provincial name, or molest one of the hundred old tottering buildings that daily threaten a dissolution upon its pavement, or permit a wench of doubtful blood to show her head on the "north sidewalk" during promenade hours. We are, you see, curiously nice in matters of color, and we should be. ”

“ Do they love to emerge from a street [Pg 15] which is narrow, dim, and deserted, upon one which is wide, bright, and crowded; and do they also like to leave a brilliant street and dive into the darkness of some somber byway? Does a long row of lights lure them, block by block, toward distances unknown? Are they tempted by the unfamiliar signs on passing street cars? Do they yearn to board those cars and be transported by them into the mystic caverns of the night? And when they see strangers who are evidently going somewhere with some special purpose, do they wish to follow ”

“ I have even dreamt that we wandered all day and all night in the cold and dreadful streets of the great city, among all those fierce and cruel street-persons, and that they looked upon us continually with their rude eyes. ”

“ There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of the Street.
Men of strength and honour fashioned that Street: good valiant men of our blood who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea. At first it was but a path trodden by bearers of water from the woodland spring to the cluster of houses by the beach. ”

“ From this point, it is interesting to walk up the hill, following the windings and turnings of the street. Let the traveller not fail to look into the queer old back-yards, and at the gardens, filled with old-fashioned flowers, gorgeous in their splendor, nor to turn and view the prospect toward the town. ”

“ These were more congenial surroundings to walk amid, even if it took one a block or two further out of the way, than a crowded street full of common rushing people, jostling and worried like themselves, and the air full of the sordid things of life. ”

“ John street and a Holy Ghost street, and these streets are shaded by orange, lemon, pomegranate, fig and other trees, the fruit of which is free to all who choose to gather. All streets are in all parts in a most disgraceful condition, and at night beneath the heavy foliage of the trees Egyptian darkness reigns. ”

“ The street is a shabby miscellany of oddly assorted occupations,—lapidaries, pickle-makers, manufacturing trades of many kinds, furniture-brokers, and nondescript shops, 'Artistes' and artizans live in the upper stories. Almost every house is adorned by its triple or quadruple row of brass bells, bright with the polish of frequent hands, and yearly multiplying themselves. ”

“ The modern city, of course, stretches far beyond the walls, street after street of clean and attractive houses, with a profusion of brilliant flowers and neatly trimmed greenery, shut in from the street, in many cases, by high stone walls, over which, however, we can easily see from our elevated position. ”

“ The dullest street of the most prosaic town has matter in it for more smiles, more tears, more intense excitement, than ever were written in story or sung in poem; the reality is there, of which the romance is the second-hand recorder. ”

“ By the time we are half-way along the street the whole city seems in wild tumult. Men rush ahead, peer into my face, deliver themselves of the above-mentioned peculiar squeak, and run hastily down some convergent alley-way. ”

“ We've an old saying in these parts: By the Street called Straight we come to the House called Beautiful. It's one of those fanciful saws of which the only justification is that it works. Any one can test the truth of it by taking the highway. Well, friend Davenant is taking it. He'll reach the House called Beautiful as straight as a die. ”

“ The street shall be built again, as spacious and splendid as ever it was, and the walls, even in troublous times. Note, as long as we are here in this world we must expect troublous times, upon some account or other. ”

“ And the younger people, native to the street, whose earliest recollections are of creeping over the paternal threshold, and rolling on the grassy margin of the track, look at it as one of the perdurable things of our mortal state,—as old as the hills of the great pasture, or the headland at the harbor’s mouth. ”

“ The cars drew up in a street—if street that could be called which was only a wide, cleared space, intersected by rails, with here and there a stump, and great piles of sawn logs bulking big in the moonlight, and a number of irregular clap-board, steep-roofed houses, many of them with open fronts, glaring with light and crowded with men. ”

“ That it is planned in short lengths is true, but there is no other way in the world that can more properly be called a single street, because of its dismal lack of accent, its sordid uniformity, its utter remoteness from delight. ”

“ The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
A chafing savage down the decent street,
[Pg 137] Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass. ”

“ Their fathers and grandsires tell them how, within a few years past, the forest stood here, with but a lonely track beneath its tangled shade. Vain legend! They cannot make it true and real to their conceptions. With them, moreover, the Main Street is a street indeed, worthy to hold its way with the thronged and stately avenues of cities beyond the sea. ”

“ So through streets within streets, dirt within dirt, room over room, in hopeless intricacy. Then we were brought to a standstill, a man was coming down the street with a bundle of wood, and we had to wait till he had gone by, the streets being too narrow for two persons to pass each other. ”

“ We entered a side-street, and would to Allah the smoke had been dense enough to blind our eyes and save us the distress of beholding such misery! The street forms a hollow way through the hills, and the rocks on both sides are full of caves, most of them widened to a height of eight feet. ”

“ The streets are paved with stone slabs, badly drained, and abounding in bad odors, and you are not likely to enjoy your walks through them; but they have magnificent names, which you will not read at the corners, such as the street of Benevolence, Righteousness, etc. ”

“ The fact is that the streets are so narrow that there is no room for display of street architecture in these lanes, culs de sac, and thoroughfares, that allow no wheeled conveyance to pass up and down. ”