[The Life of John Sterling by Thomas Carlyle]@TWC D-Link book
The Life of John Sterling

CHAPTER IX
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Daily in the cold spring air, under skies so unlike their own, you could see a group of fifty or a hundred stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare cloaks; perambulating, mostly with closed lips, the broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St.Pancras new Church.

Their lodging was chiefly in Somers Town, as I understood: and those open pavements about St.Pancras Church were the general place of rendezvous.

They spoke little or no English; knew nobody, could employ themselves on nothing, in this new scene.

Old steel-gray heads, many of them; the shaggy, thick, blue-black hair of others struck you; their brown complexion, dusky look of suppressed fire, in general their tragic condition as of caged Numidian lions.
That particular Flight of Unfortunates has long since fled again, and vanished; and new have come and fled.

In this convulsed revolutionary epoch, which already lasts above sixty years, what tragic flights of such have we not seen arrive on the one safe coast which is open to them, as they get successively vanquished, and chased into exile to avoid worse! Swarm after swarm, of ever-new complexion, from Spain as from other countries, is thrown off, in those ever-recurring paroxysms; and will continue to be thrown off.


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