- end_line
- 7119
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.594Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 7067
- text
- touching the backs of the vehicles in advance, all bespattered with
ebon mud—ebon mud that stuck like Jews’ pitch. At times the mass,
receiving some mysterious impulse far in the rear, away among the
coiled thoroughfares out of sight, would, start forward with a
spasmodic surge. It seemed as if some squadron of centaurs, on the
thither side of Phlegethon, with charge on charge, was driving
tormented humanity, with all its chattels, across.
Whichever way the eye turned, no tree, no speck of any green thing was
seen—no more than in smithies. All laborers, of whatsoever sort, were
hued like the men in foundries. The black vistas of streets were as the
galleries in coal mines; the flagging, as flat tomb-stones, minus the
consecration of moss, and worn heavily down, by sorrowful tramping, as
the vitreous rocks in the cursed Gallipagos, over which the convict
tortoises crawl.
As in eclipses, the sun was hidden; the air darkened; the whole dull,
dismayed aspect of things, as if some neighboring volcano, belching its
premonitory smoke, were about to whelm the great town, as Herculaneum
and Pompeii, or the Cities of the Plain. And as they had been upturned
in terror towards the mountain, all faces were more or less snowed or
spotted with soot. Nor marble, nor flesh, nor the sad spirit of man,
may in this cindery City of Dis abide white.
As retired at length, midway, in a recess of the bridge, Israel
surveyed them, various individual aspects all but frighted him. Knowing
not who they were; never destined, it may be, to behold them again; one
after the other, they drifted by, uninvoked ghosts in Hades. Some of
the wayfarers wore a less serious look; some seemed hysterically merry;
but the mournful faces had an earnestness not seen in the others:
because man, “poor player,” succeeds better in life’s tragedy than
comedy.
Arrived, in the end, on the Middlesex side, Israel’s heart was
prophetically heavy; foreknowing, that being of this race, felicity
could never be his lot.
For five days he wandered and wandered. Without leaving statelier
haunts unvisited, he did not overlook those broader areas—hereditary
parks and manors of vice and misery. Not by constitution disposed to
gloom, there was a mysteriousness in those impulses which led him at
this time to rovings like these. But hereby stoic influences were at
work, to fit him at a soon-coming day for enacting a part in the last
extremities here seen; when by sickness, destitution, each busy ill of
exile, he was destined to experience a fate, uncommon even to luckless
humanity—a fate whose crowning qualities were its remoteness from
relief and its depth of obscurity—London, adversity, and the sea, three
Armageddons, which, at one and the same time, slay and secrete their
victims.
- title
- Chunk 2