Explore "The City of Dreadful Night" by James Thomson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Wherever men are gathered, all the air Is charged with human feeling, human thought; Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer, Are into its vibrations surely wrought; Unspoken passion, wordless meditation, Are breathed into it with our respiration It is with our life fraught and overfraught.
So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath, As if alone on mountains or wide seas; But nourishes warm life or hastens death With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease, Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours, Incessant of his multitudinous neighbors; He in his turn affecting all of these.