Yours ever,
C. K.
ALTON LOCKE,
TAILOR AND POET.
CHAPTER I.
A POET'S CHILDHOOD.
I am a Cockney among Cockneys. Italy and the Tropics, the Highlands
and Devonshire, I know only in dreams. Even the Surrey Hills, of whose
loveliness I have heard so much, are to me a distant fairy-land, whose
gleaming ridges I am worthy only to behold afar. With the exception of two
journeys, never to be forgotten, my knowledge of England is bounded by the
horizon which encircles Richmond Hill.
My earliest recollections are of a suburban street; of its jumble of little
shops and little terraces, each exhibiting some fresh variety of capricious
ugliness; the little scraps of garden before the doors, with their dusty,
stunted lilacs and balsam poplars, were my only forests; my only wild
animals, the dingy, merry sparrows, who quarrelled fearlessly on my
window-sill, ignorant of trap or gun. From my earliest childhood, through
long nights of sleepless pain, as the midnight brightened into dawn, and
the glaring lamps grew pale, I used to listen, with pleasant awe, to the
ceaseless roll of the market-waggons, bringing up to the great city the
treasures of the gay green country, the land of fruits and flowers, for
which I have yearned all my life in vain.
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