Streetlight

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some ten minutes’ driving, up a hill or two, while lamps grow less and less frequent, and we are out of the town, rolling along a road which is as good as an ordinary English turnpike-road—passing every now and then through spots of perfect darkness, where clumps of firs overhang the road on each side, and new again looking over a broad spread of water stretching away from our feet, with a row of distant wooded slopes appearing more and more clearly as the moon slowly rises. ”

“ A street well paved, well built, well washed, as clean as a glass, populous, silent at certain times, a coquette with a sweet nightcap on its pretty blue tiles—to be short, it is the street where I was born; it is the queen of streets, always between the earth and sky; a street with a fountain; a street which lacks nothing to be celebrated among streets; and, in fact, it is the real street, the only street of Tours. If there are others, they are dark, muddy, narrow, and damp, and all come respectfully to salute this noble street, which commands them. ”

“ Go into an old street of any old city you will, and you will almost certainly find a delight for the eye in archway and ogive, in lintel and casement, in winding stair and leaning eave; in the wallflowers rooted in the steps, in the capsicum which has seeded itself between the stones, in the swallows' nests under the gargoyle, in the pots of basil and mignonette on the window-sills. But the modern street with its dreary monotony, its long and high blank spaces, its even surfaces where not a seed can cling or a bird can build, what will it say to your eyes or your heart? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The lamps in the street die out. The sickly winter dawn comes over the great city. The hush and calm still linger; only now and then a dark phantom form issues from a silent gateway, and hurries along the pavement, as though fearful of the growing light. ”

“ The street itself was dim, lit only by stray lanterns, hanging at long intervals, on ropes that ran across from house to house, but the pavement was awake to the tramp of passing feet, and men and women flitted before us like gray shadows, or stood out in bold silhouette against the lights from the doors of a cabaret, or the windows of a shop, or maybe dwelling-house. ”

“ Hawkers in a neighbouring alley were calling, and the monotonous ting-ting of the muffin-bell made an audible background to the picture. I left it, and then the glamour was already passing. In a little while darkness possessing it, the place would reassume its aspect of sordid gloom.
There is a street not far from there, bearing a name that quickens life within one, by the vision it summons of a most peaceful country, where the broad roads are but pathways through green meadows, and your footstep keeps the time to a gentle music of pure streams. ”

“ I walk on: the street is so narrow and crooked that a carriage could not pass through it; to the right and left one sees other deserted streets, other white houses, and other closed windows; my step echoes as in a corridor; the white of the walls is so bright that the reflection almost blinds me, and I am obliged to walk with my eyes closed; I seem to be passing through snow. I reach a little square: everything is closed, there is no one about. ”

“ 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? ”

“ And it is now manifest from the aspect of the street lamps, those abashed dependants of night, that already English mountain peaks have seen the dawn, that the cliffs of Dover are standing white to the morning, that the sea-mist has lifted and is pouring inland.
And now men with a hose have come and are sluicing out the streets. ”

“ You have seen the long, gray, stony street filled morning and evening with horses and laborers going out to work or returning, and in the meantime dozing somnolent in the sun, with only a cat or dog to cross it, an old woman going out for the grass, or a long, gray American Ford Ambulance banging along over the paving, the square-jawed, clean-shaven boy from the States zigzagging desperately with the vain idea that the other side of the street cannot be so rough as the one he is on. ”

“ Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Disolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, Its divisions and precisions, Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium. Half-past one, The street lamp sputtered, The street lamp muttered, The street lamp said, "Regard that woman Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door Which opens on her like a grin. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ At night, if one opened a window, and peered out at the houses crouching beneath their thick white load, and at the deserted, snow-bound streets, over which the street-lamps threw a pale, uncertain light—at night, familiar things took on an unfamiliar aspect, and the well-known streets might have been the untrodden ways that led to a new world. ”

“ 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 by-ways and cross-ways till we find ourselves in the wide street that, like a boulevard in France, runs immediately along but inside the walls. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ March till the world grows wide!
Faces in the Street They lie, the men who tell us in a loud decisive tone That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown; For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet My window-sill is level with the faces in the street — Drifting past, drifting past, To the beat of weary feet — While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not, however, within the sanctity of walls alone does the Sunlight make herself visible. Through byways, and in the open street, where the stream of life goes rushing on violently, does she tread, brightening up by her presence dark and dismal corners, and enlivening the gloomiest and dreariest places. ”

“ Thronged streets where jostle theatre and hotel,
And stately terraces where rich folk dwell....
It has black alleys, and most dismal plains
Crossed by long, steady, fire-emitting trains;
Foul slums and palaces, prisons and spires
And suburbs where the jaundiced clerk expires.
But love and hope are always with us, too:
And such bright eyes, to make the sky seem blue! ”

“ The upper storeys of the houses jut out into the street in such a manner that they constantly meet, forming an archway underneath, and yet the streets are never dark, from the dazzling whiteness of all the walls, which reflect the light in every direction and gild and brighten the darkest corners. ”

“ A raw, cold street in the short winter days, taking the brunt of blizzards and cruel winds, whirling snow and biting cold, fog-swept, or shimmering in heat, greasy and roughly paved. A street to stand rough knocks from rough men, who owned the clothes they stood in, and little else ”

“ Not a murmur comes here from the city, whose smoke rises, a murky cloud, far off in the valley below. The streets there will be stifling to-day amid the hot reekings of asphalt pavements, the sifting particles of burning dust, and the incessant roar of traffic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Straight from west to east, side by side, run several such streets, the principal ones of the city, crossed again at right angles by others every bit as straight—all without a single saving grace of curve, of sheltering crescent, or tree-shaded square, so that when a hot north wind blows it rushes across the interstices of these streets like a hot blast from a furnace, eddying thick clouds of yellow dust—filled with the unutterable debris of the streets—furiously round each corner. ”

“ The street elects a king and queen, plasters itself with bunting, arches itself with electric lights, lines its curbs with temporary booths, fills its corners with shows, sells confetti until the pedestrian swims in it—and then whoops it up for a week. ”

“ The streets generally are four or five to eight feet wide and as crooked as a corkscrew. You go along one of these gloomy cracks, and look up and behold the sky like a mere ribbon of light, far above your head, where the tops of the tall houses on either side of the street bend almost together. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Blue and pink and red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their silence is as impressive as their beauty. ”