Covent Garden by Oscar Wilde

Where he went he hardly knew. He had a dim memory of wandering through a / labyrinth of sordid houses, of being lost in a giant web of sombre / streets, and it was bright dawn when he found himself at last in / Piccadilly Circus. As he strolled home towards Belgrave Square, he met / the great waggons on their way to Covent Garden. The white-smocked / carters, with their pleasant sunburnt faces and coarse curly hair, strode / sturdily on, cracking their whips, and calling out now and then to each / other; on the back of a huge grey horse, the leader of a jangling team, / sat a chubby boy, with a bunch of primroses in his battered hat, keeping / tight hold of the mane with his little hands, and laughing; and the great / piles of vegetables looked like masses of jade against the morning sky, / like masses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellous / rose.

Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he could not tell why. There / was something in the dawn's delicate loveliness that seemed to him / inexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that break in / beauty, and that set in storm. These rustics, too, with their rough, / good-humoured voices, and their nonchalant ways, what a strange London / they saw! A London free from the sin of night and the smoke of day, a / pallid, ghost-like city, a desolate town of tombs! He wondered what they / thought of it, and whether they knew anything of its splendour and its / shame, of its fierce, fiery-coloured joys, and its horrible hunger, of / all it makes and mars from morn to eve. Probably it was to them merely a / mart where they brought their fruits to sell, and where they tarried for / a few hours at most, leaving the streets still silent, the houses still / asleep. It gave him pleasure to watch them as they went by. Rude as / they were, with their heavy, hob-nailed shoes, and their awkward gait, / they brought a little of a ready with them. He felt that they had lived / with Nature, and that she had taught them peace. He envied them all that / they did not know.

By the time he had reached Belgrave Square the sky was a faint blue, and / the birds were beginning to twitter in the gardens. -- _Lord Arthur / Savile's Crime_.