The morning mists still haunt the stony street;

The northern summer air is shrill and cold;

And lo, the Hospital, grey, quiet, old,

Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet.

Thro' the loud spaciousness and draughty gloom

A small, strange child—so agèd yet so young!—

Her little arm besplinted and beslung,

Precedes me gravely to the waiting-room.

I limp behind, my confidence all gone.

The grey-haired soldier-porter waves me on,

And on I crawl, and still my spirits fail:

A tragic meaness seems so to environ

These corridors and stairs of stone and iron,

Cold, naked, clean—half-workhouse and half-jail.

William Earnest Henley,
London Voluntaries, 1898.