twelve o’clock
What a farce , he would cry , is all this poetry , philosophy , art , and culture , when millions of wretched mortals are doomed to the eternal darkness and crime of the city ! Here are the educated classes occupying themselves with exquisite emotions , with speculations upon the Infinite , with addresses to flowers , with the worship of waterfalls and flying clouds , and with the incessant portraiture of a thousand moods and variations of love , while their neighbours lie grovelling in the mire , and never know anything more of life or its duties than is afforded them by a police report in a bit of newspaper picked out of the kennel . We went one evening to hear a great violin-player , who played such music , and so exquisitely , that the limits of life were removed . But we had to walk up the Haymarket home , between eleven and twelve o'clock , and the violin-playing became the merest trifling . M'Kay had been brought up upon the Bible . He had before him , not only there , but in the history of all great religious movements , a record of the improvement of the human race , or of large portions of it , not merely by gradual civilisation , but by inspiration spreading itself suddenly . He could not get it out of his head that something of this kind is possible again in our time .