"The smallest street is too human for any human being to realise.".

People say that the country is more poetical [than the town]. It is not true. The town would immediately strike us as far more poetical if we happened to know anything at all about the town. If we applied to human traces the same vivid imagination which we apply to the traces of beasts or birds we should find not only the street, but any chance inch of the street, far more romantic than a glade. We say (when in a country lane): "Here is a nest," and we immediately begin to wonder about the bird who made it. But we do not say: "Here is a railing," and then immediately begin to wonder about the man who made it. We regard such things as railings as coming by a kind of fate, quite unlike the almost individual influence which we recognise in the growths of the countryside. We regard eggs as personal creations and mole-hills as personal creations. Such things as railings are the only things that we think impersonal, because they are the only things that are really made by persons. This is the difficulty of the town: that personality is so compressed and packed into it that we cannot realise its presence. The smallest street is too human for any human being to realise.

-Chesterton's Introduction to Literary London by Elsie M. Lang (1906)