Is it well that while we range with Science glorying in the Time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet.
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street;
There the master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread;
There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor.
— LORD TENNYSON, Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After.
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