A Foggy Night in London

Oil on Canvas - Year Unknown

James Abbott McNeill, 1834-1903

  "London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth."

--Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Ecce Homo!
1871
Antonio Ciseri 

Moravian Texts March 29, 2013
Good Friday

"When you said, 'Seek My face,' my heart said to you, 'Your face, O Lord, I shall seek.'"
Psalm 27:8 (NASB)

"Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, And Pilate said to them, 'Behold the Man!'"
John 19:5 (KJV) 

"A Fisherman and a Woman Beside a Shore"

Oil on Canvas - c. 1900

Fredrick Millard

HE dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

 

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

 

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and oh,

The difference to me!

        Journey of the Magi
Oil on Canvas, 1894
James Tissot 

       "And this was the Savior they had come so far to find!

       Yet they worshipped without a doubt.

       Why?

       Their faith rested upon the signs sent them by him whom we have since come to know as the Father; and they were of the kind to whom his promises were so all-sufficient that they asked nothing about his ways. Few there were who had seen the signs and heard the promises--the Mother and Joseph, the shepherds, and the Three--yet they all believed alike; that is to say, in this period of the plan of salvation, God was all and the Child nothing. But look forward, O reader! A time will come when the signs will all proceed from the Son. Happy they who then believe in him!

          Let us wait that period."

--Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ

Edinburgh Castle and the Nor' Loch
c. 1780
Alexander Nasmyth 

"God gave us the Saviour-a perfect Saviour- but a Saviour with nothing fixed, nothing final, nothing static about His perfection. The more we have tasted of His grace, the more grace there seems to be awaiting us. As, with the passing of the years, I catch vaster visions of the grace available to me, I feel as Robin Fordyce fest in Edinburgh. Ian Hay has told Robin's story in The Right Stuff. Robin's superb adventure came when he left the tiny village in which all his days had been spent and went up to Edinburgh to sit for an examination for a bursary. As the great day drew near, his father and mother loaded him with sage counsel. 'Always say "Sir" to the professors!' urged his father. 'And always wear a clean collar!' pleaded his mother. 

Robin's first impressions of Edinburgh were disappointing. The city was not so extensive as he had imagined. Moreover, it was roofed in. This, he thought, would make it comfortable on wet days, but it imparted a distinct sense of stuffiness to the atmosphere. He was suprised, too, that railways trains were allowed to run about all over the city. He could scarcely walk fifty yards with coming upon a railway train. And the shops! They were certainly bigger and more elaborate than the shops of the village; but they were not at all as he had pictured them; and there seemed to be no shops but tobacco shoups, news shops, confectionery shops, and the like.

All at once, Robin glimpsed a flight of steps, It then flashed upon him that there might be a second story. He resolved to investigate. He climbed the stairs, and all at once, the Castle, Calton Hill, and all the glories of Edinburgh broke breathlessly upon him. Until that moment he had only been poking about the station!

'Why, there's more of it!' he cried, as he looked this way and that way in speechless admiration."

From the essay "He Added No More!" in F.W. Boreham's Boulevards of Paradise

The Poets
Oil on Canvas, 1919
Georgios Roilos 

         “Dorothea's faith supplied all that Mr. Casaubon's words seemed to leave unsaid: what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.”

--George Elliot (Mary Anne Evans), Middlemarch

Campaign of France
1864, Oil on Canvas
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier
 

"God and the soldier
All men adore
In time of trouble,
And no more;
For when war is over
And all things righted,
God is neglected -
The old soldier slighted."

--Written on a sentry box at Prince Edward's Gate, Gibralter 

The Cottage Door
Oil on Canvas, c1785
Thomas Gainsborough

"It is really very wonderful how inextricably the violets have got mixed up with the vipers in this higgledy-piggledy world! Look on this exquisite little painting, executed by Miss Diana Eaton, eldest daughter of the Honourable Mr. Eaton. It is a dainty sketch in water colours of Phoebe Crowhurst's cottage near Abchurch. It hangs, as Mark Rutherford tells us, in the great drawing-room at the hall, and is considered most picturesque.

'Lovely! What a dear old place!' said the guests.

'It makes one quite enamoured of the country,' exclaimed Lady Fanshawe, one of the most determined diners-out in Mayfair. 'I never look at a scene like that without wishing I could give up London altogether! I am sure I could be content. It would be so charming to get rid of conventionality and be perfectly natural. You really ought to send real drawings to the Academy, Miss Eaton!'

Here are the Violets!

And yet, in reality, the romantic little cottage was a wretched, insanitary little hovel in which neither health nor comfort were possible. The room in which Phoebe died of consumption had no fireplace, and great patches of plaster had been brought down by the rain. Just underneath her window was the pig-sty!

Here are the VIPERS!

Mark Rutherford gets angry! 'That we should take pleasure,' he says, 'in pictures of filthy, ruined hovels in which health and even virture are impossible! It is more than strange that people should go into sham ecstasies over one of these pig-sties, should give a thousand pounds for its light and shade, while inside the real sty, at the very moment when the auctioneer knocks down the drawing amidst applause, lies the mother dying of dirt fever; the mother of six children starving and sleeping there -- starving, save for the parish allowance, for the snow is on the ground and the father is out of work!'

Here are VIOLETS AND VIPERS!"

From the essay "Violets and Vipers" in the book The Golden Milestone by F.W. Boreham.

Study for 'The Haunted House'

Oil on Board, 1878-1959

Alfred James Munnings

“I was Robbed! I’ve spent the whole night waiting for the Great Pumpkin when I could have been out for tricks or treat. Halloween is over and I missed it. You blockhead! You kept me up all night waiting for the Great Pumpkin, and all that came was a beagle . . . and it was all your fault! I’ll sue! What a fool I was. I could have had candy apples and gum and cookies and money and all sorts of things. But no! . . . You owe me restitution!”

--Sally to Linus in “It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown”