| I’m gonna drown myself in London’s lost rivers | 
| I will walk down to the rain | 
| From Hubert Montague Crackenthorpe’s Vignettes (1896): | 
| I have sat there and seen the winter days finish their short-spanned lives; | 
| and all the globes of light — crimson, emerald, and pallid yellow — start, | 
| one by one, out of the russet fog that creeps up the river. | 
| But I like the | 
| place best on these hot summer nights, when the sky hangs thick with stifled | 
| colour, and the stars shine small and shyly. | 
| Then the pulse of the city is hushed, and the scales of the water flicker golden and oily under the watching | 
| regiment of lamps. | 
| The bridge clasps its gaunt arms tight from bank to bank, and the shuffle of a retreating figure sounds loud and alone in the quiet. | 
| There, if you wait long | 
| enough, you will hear the long wail of the siren, that seems to tell of the | 
| anguish of London till a train hurries to throttle its dying note, | 
| roaring and rushing, thundering and blazing through the night, tossing its | 
| white crests of smoke, charging across the bridge into the dark country beyond. | 
| In the wan, lingering light of the winter afternoon, the parks stood all | 
| deserted, sluggishly drowsing, so it seemed, with their spacious distances | 
| muffled in greyness: colourless, fabulous, blurred. | 
| One by one, through the | 
| damp misty air, looked the tall, stark, lifeless elms. | 
| Overhead there lowered a turbid sky, heavy-charged with an unclean yellow, and amid their ugly patches | 
| of dank and rotting bracken, a little mare picked her way noiselessly. | 
| The rumour of life seemed hushed. | 
| There was only the vague listless rhythm of the creaking saddle. | 
| The daylight faded. | 
| A shroud of ghostly mist enveloped the earth, | 
| and up from the vaporous distance crept slowly the evening darkness. | 
| A sullen glow throbs overhead: golden will-o'-the-wisps are threading their | 
| shadowy ribbons above golden trees, and the dull, distant rumour of feverish | 
| London waits on the still night air. | 
| The lights of Hyde Park Corner blaze like | 
| some monster, gilded constellation, shaming the dingy stars. | 
| And across the | 
| east, there flares a sky-sign, a gaudy crimson arabesque. | 
| And all the air hangs | 
| draped in the mysterious sumptuous splendour of a murky London night. | 
| I’m gonna drown myself in the lost rivers of London | 
| I am gonna drown myself in the lost rivers of London |