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all but for being condemned by some vexatious business to solitary confinement in London for the space of one calendar autumn : so we took to the streets as a sort of tread-mill . But those chestnuts will not be the same in the winter , the summer , or the spring ; and they are part and parcel of London . It is a leaden blunder to suppose that autumn makes no difference in , or rather on , London .
Autumn must have its peculiar beauties here as everywhere else , as long as autumnal suns and autumnal moons are better than other suns and other moons , which they always have been since the world began . Adam , the Rabbins say , was created in autumn , no doubt that the world might be looking its best when he was introduced to it , and even the fruits of Eden be shining with a mellower lustre , and the cheek of Eve be tinted with a richer bloom .
There is a ripeness in autumnal sunbeams—there is a richness in their reflection from marble doine or lofty spire , or flowing stream , which the light of other seasons lacks . And then the moon—no countryman , whatever be his country , Welshman , Cumberlander , or Scotch Highlander—no traveller wherever he has wandered , or mariner pacing the lonely deck and looking up to the midnight sky from amongst the waves of the wide Atlantic—no Syrian shepherds watching their flocks by night , or older Chaldeans reading
the starry book of fate , ever saw so vast and broad , and massive , so rich a globe of gold , so near , and so portentous in its awful loveliness , as the full autumnal moon that looms through a London atmosphere . It repays the penalty of the thickened air to which we owe this beauty ; we could not have it without our coalfire exhalations ; we smoke for it ; but as only Thames water can generate the true London porter , the finest beverage on earth , so the most perfect loveliness and grandeur of a full rising moon can only be manufactured in the murky air of London .
There is another of nature ' s perfections , and one to which sun and moon and the twelve stars would , if they had eyes and ears , do obeisance , as they did in Josephs dream , which is only to be seen during a London autumn—we mean Miss Kelly . To leave London can never be called running away from the artificial to the natural while she is here . There is nature enough
in her to counterpoise all the artificiality of the whole metropolis . The English Opera , when she is in it , ought to be called an oratorio , that William Wilberforce might go and smile and weep with a sound conscience , and find it practical religion / as she illustrates some text out of the human bosom with all her own unpretending : and unrivalled power and pathos .
If it be insisted upon that hill and valley , tree and stream , are essential to scenery , and to the existence of man , as endowed with a rational soul and body , through the autumn , we still say that all this may be had in London , and that , too , in beauty and abundance . For is not Richmond in London , with its Temp 6
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No . 70 . 3 B
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Autumn in London . 66 b
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1832, page 665, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1822/page/17/
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