Part I TOWARDS DEMOCRACY

3

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY

The sun, the moon and the stars, the grass, the water that flows round the earth, and the light air of heaven:

To You greeting. I too stand behind these and send you word across them.

I

Freedom at last!

Long sought, long prayed for—ages and ages long:

The burden to which I continually return, seated here thick-booted and obvious yet dead and buried and passed into heaven, unsearchable;

[How know you indeed but what I have passed into you?]

And Joy, beginning but without ending—the journey of journeys—Thought laid quietly aside:

These things I, writing, translate for you—I wipe a mirror and place it in your hands.

II

The sun shines, as of old; the stars look down from heaven; the moon, crescent, sails in the twilight; on bushy tops in the warm nights, naked, with mad dance and song, the earth-children address themselves to love;

4Civilisation sinks and swims, but the old facts remain—the sun smiles, knowing well its strength.

The little red stars appear once more on the hazel boughs, shining among the catkins; over waste lands the pewit tumbles and cries as at the first day; men with horses go out on the land—they shout and chide and strive—and return again glad at evening; the old earth breathes deep and rhythmically, night and day, summer and winter, giving and concealing herself.

I arise out of the dewy night and shake my wings.

Tears and lamentations are no more. Life and death lie stretched below me. I breathe the sweet æther blowing of the breath of God.

Deep as the universe is my life—and I know it; nothing can dislodge the knowledge of it; nothing can destroy, nothing can harm me.

Joy, joy arises—I arise. The sun darts overpowering piercing rays of joy through me, the night radiates it from me.

I take wings through the night and pass through all the wildernesses of the worlds, and the old dark holds of tears and death—and return with laughter, laughter, laughter:

Sailing through the starlit spaces on outspread wings, we two—O laughter! laughter! laughter!

III

Freedom! the deep breath! the word heard centuries and centuries beforehand; the soul singing low and passionate to itself: Joy! Joy!

5Not as in a dream. The earth remains and daily life remains, and the scrubbing of doorsteps, and the house and the care of the house remains; but Joy fills it, fills the house full and swells to the sky and reaches the stars: all Joy!

O freed soul! soul that has completed its relation to the body! O soaring, happy beyond words, into other realms passing, salutations to you, freed, redeemed soul!

What is certain, and not this? What is solid?—the rocks? the mountains? destiny?

The gates are thrown wide open all through the universe. I go to and fro—through the heights and depths I go and I return: All is well.

I conceive the purport of all suffering. The blear-eyed boy, famished in brain, famished in body, shivering there in his rags by the angle of the house, is become divine before me; I hold him long and silently by the hand and pray to him.

I conceive a millennium on earth—a millennium not of riches, nor of mechanical facilities, nor of intellectual facilities, nor absolutely of immunity from disease, nor absolutely of immunity from pain; but a time when men and women all over the earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies—shall attain freedom and joy;

And the men and women of that time looking back with something like envy to the life of to-day, that they too might have borne a part in its travail and throes of birth.

All is well: to-day and a million years hence, equally. To you the whole universe is given for a garden of delight, and to the soul that loves, in the great coherent Whole, the 6hardest and most despised lot is even with the best; and there is nothing more certain or more solid than this.

IV

Freedom! the deep breath!

The old Earth breathes deep and rhythmically, night and day, summer and winter; the cuckoo calls across the woodland, and the willow-wren warbles among the great chestnut buds; the laborer eases himself under a hedge, and the frog flops into the pond as the cows approach;

In the theatre Juliet from her balcony still bends in the moonlight, and Romeo leans up from the bushes below; in the pale dawn, still, faint with love he tears himself away; the great outlines of the fields and hills where you were born and grew up remain apparently unchanged.

If I am not level with the lowest I am nothing; and if I did not know for a certainty that the craziest sot in the village is my equal, and were not proud to have him walk with me as my friend, I would not write another word—for in this is my strength.

My thoughts are nothing, but I myself will reach my arms through time, constraining you.

These are the days which nourished and fed me so kindly and well; this is the place where I was born, the walls and roofs which are familiar to me, the windows out of which I have looked. This is the overshadowing love and care of parents; these are the faces and deeds, indelible, of brothers and sisters—closing round me like a wall—the early world in which I lay so long.

7This is to-day: the little ship lies ready, the fresh air blowing, the sunlight pouring over the world. These are the gates of all cities and habitations standing open; this is the love of men and women accompanying me wherever I go; these are the sacred memories of that early world, time may never change.

And this is the word which swells the bosom of the hills and feeds the sacred laughter of the streams, for man: the purpose which endures for you in those old fields and hills and the sphinx-glance of the stars.

V

I, Nature, stand, and call to you though you heed not: Have courage, come forth, O child of mine, that you may see me.

As a nymph of the invisible air before her mortal beloved, so I glance before you—I dart and stand in your path—and turn away from your heedless eyes like one in pain.

I am the ground; I listen the sound of your feet. They come nearer. I shut my eyes and feel their tread over my face.

I am the trees; I reach downward my long arms and touch you, though you heed not, with enamored fingers; my leaves and zigzag branches write wonderful words against the evening sky—for you, for you—say, can you not even spell them?

O shame! shame! I fling you away from me (you shall not know that I love you). Unworthy! I strike you across the face; does the blood mount to your cheek now? my glove rings at your feet: I dare you to personal combat.

Will you come forth? will you do the daring deed? 8will you strip yourself naked as you came into the world, and come before me, and regard unafraid the flashing of my sword? will you lose your life, to Me?

O child of mine!

See! you are in prison, and I can give you space;

You are choked down below there, by the dust of your own raising, and I can give you the pure intoxicating air of the mountains to breathe;

I can make you a king, and show you all the lands of the earth;

And from yourself to yourself I can deliver you, and can come, your enemy, and gaze long and long with yells of laughter into your eyes!

VI

The caddis worm leaves the water, and takes on wings and flies in the upper air; the walking mud becomes amorous of the winged sunlight, and behaves itself in an abandoned manner.

The Earth (during its infancy) flies round the Sun from which it sprang, and the mud flies round the pond from which it sprang.

The earth swims in space, the fish swim in the sea, the bird swims in the air, and the soul of man in the ocean of Equality—towards which all the other streams run.

Here, into this ocean, everything debouches; all interest in life begins anew. The plantain in the croft looks different from what it did before.

9Do you understand? To realise Freedom or Equality (for it comes to the same thing)—for this hitherto, for you, the universe has rolled; for this, your life, possibly yet many lives; for this, death, many deaths; for this, desires, fears, complications, bewilderments, sufferings, hope, regret—all falling away at last duly before the Soul, before You (O laughter!) arising the full grown lover—possessor of the password.

The path of Indifference—action, inaction, good, evil, pleasure, pain, the sky, the sea, cities and wilds—all equally used (never shunned), adopted, put aside, as materials only; you continuing, love continuing—the use and freedom of materials dawning at last upon you.

O laughter! the Soul invading, looking proudly upon its new kingdom, possessing the offerings of all pleasures, forbidden and unforbidden, from all created things—if perchance it will stoop to accept them; the everlasting life.

From that day forward objects turn round upon themselves with an exceedingly innocent air, but are visibly not the same;

Fate is leveled, and the mountains and pyramids look foolish before the glance of a little child; love becomes possessed of itself, and of the certainty of its own fruition (which it never could have before).

Here the essence of all expression, and the final surrender of Art—for this the divine Artists have struggled and still struggle;

10For this the heroes and lovers of all ages have laid down their lives; and nations like tigers have fought, knowing well that this life was a mere empty blob without Freedom.

Where this makes itself known in a people or even in the soul of a single man or woman, there Democracy begins to exist.

Of that which exists in the Soul, political freedom and institutions of equality, and so forth, are but the shadows (necessarily thrown); and Democracy in States or Constitutions but the shadow of that which first expresses itself in the glance of the eye or the appearance of the skin.

Without that first the others are of no account, and need not be further mentioned.

VII

Inevitable in time for man and all creation is the realisation: the husks one behind another keep shelling and peeling off.

Rama crosses to Ceylon by the giant stepping-stones; and the Ganges floats with the flowers and sacred lamps of pilgrims; Diotima teaches Socrates divine lore; Benedict plunges his midnight lust in nettles and briars; and Bruno stands prevaricating yet obstinate before his judges.

The midnight jackals scream round the village; and the feigned cry of the doe is heard as she crosses the track of the hunter pursuing her young; the chaffinch sits close in her perfect nest, and the shining leaping waters of the streams run on and on.

The great stream of history runs on.

11Over the curve of the misty horizon, out of the dim past (do you not see it?) over the plains of China and the burning plains of India, by the tombs of Egypt and through the gardens beneath the white tower of Belus and under the shadow of the rock of Athens, the great stream descends:

Soft slow broad-bosomed mother-stream—where the Ark floats, and Isis in her moon-shaped boat sails on with the corpse of Osiris, and the child-god out of the water rises seated on a lotus flower, and Brahma two-sexed dwells amid the groves, and the maidens weep for Adonis.

Mighty long-delaying vagrant stream! Of innumerable growing rustling life! Out of some cavern mouth long ago where the cave-dwellers sat gnawing burnt bones, down to to-day—with ever growing tumult, and glints of light upon thee in the distance as of half-open eyes, and the sound of countless voices out of thee, nearer, nearer, past promontory after promontory winding, widening, hastening!

Now to-day, turbid wild and unaccountable in sudden Niagara-plunge toward thy nearer oceanic levels descending—

How wonderful art thou!

VIII

Lo! to-day the falling waters—the ribbed white perpendicular seas—shaking the ground with their eternal thunder! Lo! above all rising like a sign into the immense height of the sky, the columned vapor and calm exhalation of their agony—

The Arisen and mighty soul of Man!

12[The word runs like fire along the ground; who shall contain it? the word that is nothing—as fire is nothing and yet it devours the land in a moment.]

Lo! to-day the eagle soul that stretches its neck into the height, looking before and after; the living banner calling with audible inaudible voice through all times; the spirit whose eyes are heavy with gazing out over the immense world of MAN!

[O spirit! spirit! spirit! spirit! stretching thy arms out over the world,

Calling to thy children—spirit of the brow of love and feet of war and thunder—

Thou art let loose within me!

No delicate fiction art thou to me now—the sound of thy steps appals me with joy as thou stridest—fills me with joy and power.

Go, go, my soul, stream out on the wind with this one—I laugh as the ancient cities shake like leaves in the din and tumult;

Go shout on the winds that the world is alive, that the Arisen one controls it—

I laugh as the ground rocks under my feet, I laugh as I walk through the forest, and the trees reel to and fro, and their great dead branches chatter——

Shout on the winds, though the foaming hell grows hoarse with gusty thunder, shout that the crashing distracted hurrying eddying world is taken

Prisoner in the highest!]

Ah! the live Earth trembles beneath thy footsteps; 13the passionate deep shuddering words run along the ground: who shall contain, who shall understand them?

Surely, surely, age after age out of the ground itself arising, from the chinks of the lips of the clods and from between the blades of grass, up with the tall-growing wheat surely ascending——

Deep-muttered, vast, inaudible—they come—the strange new words, through the frame of the great Mother and through the frames of her children trembling:

Freedom!

And among the far nations there is a stir like the stir of the leaves of a forest.

Joy, Joy arising on Earth!

And lo! the banners lifted from point to point, and the spirits of the ancient races looking abroad—the divinely beautiful daughters of God calling to their children.

The nations of the old and of the new worlds!

See, what hastening of feet, what throngs, what rustling movement!

Lo! the divine East from ages and ages back intact her priceless jewel of thought—the germ of Democracy—bringing down! [Gentle and venerable India well pleased now at last to hear fulfilled the words of her ancient sages.]

Lo, Arabia! peerless in dignity, eternal in manhood of love and war—pivoting like a centre the races of mankind; Siberia, the aged mother, breaking forth uncontrollable into exultant shouting, from Kokan to farthest Kamschatka and the moss-morasses of the Arctic Sea!

See how they arise and call to each other! Norway 14with wild hair streaming, dancing frantic on her mountain tops? Italy from dreams, from languid passionate memories amid her marble ruins, to deeds again arising; Greece; Belgium; Denmark; Ireland—liberty’s deathless flame leaping on her Atlantic Shore!

O the wild races of Africa, beautiful children of the sun, hardy and superb, givers of gifts to the common stock without which all the other gifts were useless! The native tribes still roaming in the freedom of the earth and the waters: the Greenlander and his little boy together in their canoe towing the dead seal, the tawny bronzed Malay, and Papuan, and Australian through the interminable silent bush tracking infallibly for water or the kangaroo!

Lo! the great users and accumulators of materials, the proud and melancholy Titans struggling with civilisation! England, ringed with iron and with the glitter of her waves upon her; Germany; France; Russia—and the flow of East and West, and the throes of womanhood and the future; lo! Spain—dark, proud, voiceless, biting her lips, with high white arm beckoning beckoning! And you, too, ye manifold Stars and Stripes—unto what great destiny!

The peoples of the Earth; the intertwining many-colored streams!

China, gliding seemingly unobservant among the crowd, self-restrained, of her own soul calmly possessed; the resplendent-limbed Negro and half-caste (do you not see that old woman there with brow and nose and jaw dating conclusively back from far away Egypt?); the glitter-eyed caressing-handed Hindu, suave thoughtful Persian, and faithful Turk; Mexico and the Red Indian (O unconscious pleading eyes of the 15dying races!); Japan and the Isles of the Pacific, and the caravan wanderers and dwellers in the oases of Sahara.

O glancing eyes! O leaping shining waters! Do I not know that thou Democracy dost control and inspire, that thou, too, hast relations to these—and a certainty—

As surely as Niagara has relations to Erie and Ontario?

IX

Lo! the spirit floats in the air.

On his lips it kisses the young man from China, and the patient old man, and the spiritual-faced boy;

And on his lips the long-eyed Japanee; and on his thick lips the Negro:

Come!

And to the forlorn emigrant, to the old Irish woman with shriveled brown anxious face, and to her barefoot beautiful daughter, and to the young fair-haired woman from Sweden:

Come!

And to the Portuguese lad with shining teeth and smiling mouth, and to the long-haired Italian, and to the ruddy Scot;

And to the young Tamil boy holding up flowers and pouring his morning libation of water to the Sun, and to his grandmother superintending the household with quiet loving care; and to the rows of Hindu villagers squatted by the water tanks at early morning, bathing and chatting, and to the women their wives cleaning their brass-glancing waterpots; and to the noble Mahratta women, and to the beautiful almond-eyed women of Egypt, and to the shifty clever Eurasian, and to the stunted dweller by the sacred unfrozen lake of Thibet:

16Come!—and to the wanderers lighting their camp-fires at the feet of the world-old statues at Thebes; and to the sacred exiles on the march to Irkutsk; to the wild riders across the plains of Wallachia;

And to the sweet healthy-bodied English girl, and to the drink-marked prostitute, and to the convicted criminals, the diseased decrepit and destitute of all the Earth:

Lo! my children I give myself to you; I stretch my arms; on the lips each one in the name of all I kiss you:

Come! And out of your clinging kisses, see! I create a new world.

X

Who understands?

Who draws close as a little child?

Ah! who is he who stands closest? And has heard the word, himself, uttered out of the ground from between the clods?

Who is the wise statesman who walks hand in hand with his people, guiding and guided?

Who is the child of the people, moving joyous, liquid, free, among his equals, touching nearest the serene untampered facts of earth and sky?

Who is the poet whom love has made strong strong strong with all strength?

Ah! who is he who says to the great good Mother: Cling fast, O Mother, and hold me; clasp thy fingers over my face and draw me to thee for ever?

17

XI

The scene changes; the sun and the stars are veiled, the solid earth alone is left. I am buried (I too that I may rise again) deep underfoot among the clods.

Each one a transparent miracle, competent with man and his vast-aspiring religions and civilisations—but for me they are only dirt.

Level wastes of sand and scrub; mudflats by the mouths of rivers; old disheveled rocks and oozy snow; trickling slime-places and ponds and bogs and mangrove marshes and chattering shale-slopes and howling deserted ridges and heaps of broken glass and old bones and shoes and pots and pans in blind alleys and fogs along flat shores and crimes betrayals murders thefts respectability, bad smells by house doors, filthy-smelling interiors of factories and drawing-rooms, stale scents, gas, dirt, evil faces, drunkenness, cruelty to animals, and the cruelty of animals to each other——

This is the solid earth in the midst of which I am buried.

O I am mad! the lightning flashes on evil raw places. I stretch uneasily in my grave and tumble the towers of great cities with my feet; the volcanos lurch and spill their molten liquor.

I hate those nearest me, and am closed, captious and intolerant. I sweep a great space round me and sulk in the middle of it.

18Now underneath the earth on which you walk I sport in the fire of Hell;

Satan is my friend and vicious blood-spilling lusts and clenched teeth push the way for me to destruction. I dance in the flames and will claw every one in: take care how you cross me!

Your talk of goodness I despise. To every conceivable sin I hold out my hand. My touch blackens you. I crawl forth out of slime and worms and blink at the sun. I press my way madly through the gallows-crowd to him who bears my reprieve held up on high.

This is the Cross; these are the eyes of Christ—and of the crossing-sweeper;

This is the Divine love which encloses and redeems all evil. Ah! here is peace!

Flat curtains hang round me in every direction (as they hang round you), and behind them the live people go dancing and laughing: but we are not going to be baffled.

Sex still goes first, and hands eyes mouth brain follow; from the midst of belly and thighs radiate the knowledge of self, religion, and immortality.

XII

The clods press suffocating closer and closer—grit and filth accumulate in the eyes and mouth, I can neither see nor speak—the devil and the worms dance around.

19The immortal worms make their obeisance to you, and the religious devil grins at you—they compliment you on your superiority.

The Earth is for you, and all that is therein—save what anyone else can grab; and universal love is for you—and to sleek yourself smoother than others in the glass; and to fly on from world to world, leaving sweet odors behind you, and to get cleverer and cleverer and better and better as you go, and to be generally superior!

How very nice! the devil and the worms thank you for your kind invitation to accompany them; but regret that they are engaged.

XIII

This is poison! do not touch it—the black brew of the cauldron out of which Democracy firks its horned and shameless head.

O disrespectable Democracy! I love you. No white angelic spirit are you now, but a black and horned Ethiopian—your great grinning lips and teeth and powerful brow and huge limbs please me well.

Where you go about the garden there are great footmarks and an uncanny smell; the borders are trampled and I see where you have lain and rolled in a great bed of lilies, bruising the sweetness from them.

I follow you far afield and into the untrodden woods, and there remote from man you disclose yourself to me, goat-footed and sitting on a rock—as to the Athenian runner of old.

20You fill me with visions, and when the night comes I see the forests upon your flanks and your horns among the stars. I climb upon you and fulfil my desire.

XIV

The heights heighten and the depths deepen; from beneath the eyelids of man look forth new heavens and a new earth. The glitter of sunlight upon the waves is there.

Here underneath, the great lubricous roots grasp downward in darkness at the rocks; there the tall shaft shoots into air, and the leaves float poised in the sunshine—but the word conceals itself.

Of the goat-legged God peering over the tops of the clouds; of the wild creature running in the woods of whom the rabbits are not afraid; of him who peeps his horns in at the windows of the churches, and the congregation cross themselves and the parson saws his loudest; of the shameless lusty unpresentable pal; of the despised one hobbling on hoofs—I dream.

Of the despised and rejected, arising with healing in his wings, of the sane sweet companion in the morning, of the Lover who neither adorns nor disguises himself—I dream.

XV

O Democracy, I shout for you!

Back! Make me a space round me, you kid-gloved rotten-breathed paralytic world, with miserable antics mimicking the appearance of life.

21England! for good or evil it is useless to attempt to conceal yourself—I know you too well.

I am the very devil. I will tear your veils off, your false shows and pride I will trail in the dust,—you shall be utterly naked before me, in your beauty and in your shame.

For who better than I should know your rottenness, your self-deceit, your delusion, your hideous grinning corpse-chattering death-in-life business at top? (and who better than I the wonderful hidden sources of your strength beneath?)

Deceive yourself no longer.

Do you think your smooth-faced Respectability will save you? or that Cowardice carries a master-key of the universe in its pocket—scrambling miserably out of the ditch on the heads of those beneath it?

Do you think that it is a fine thing to grind cheap goods out of the hard labor of ill-paid boys? and do you imagine that all your Commerce Shows and Manufactures are anything at all compared with the bodies and souls of these?

Do you suppose I have not heard your talk about Morality and Religion and set it face to face in my soul to the instinct of one clean naked unashamed Man? or that I have not seen your coteries of elegant and learned people put to rout by the innocent speech of a child, and the apparition of a mother suckling her own babe!

Do you think that there ever was or could be Infidelity greater than this?

Do you grab interest on Money and lose all interest 22in Life? Do you found a huge system of national Credit on absolute personal Distrust? Do you batten like a ghoul on the dead corpses of animals, and then expect to be of a cheerful disposition? Do you put the loving beasts to torture as a means of promoting your own health and happiness? Do you, O foolishest one, fancy to bind men together by Laws (of all ideas the most laughable), and set whole tribes of unbelievers at work year after year patching that rotten net? Do you live continually farther and farther from Nature, till you actually doubt if there be any natural life, or any avenging instinct in the dumb elements?— And then do you wonder that your own Life is slowly ebbing—that you have lost all gladness and faith?

I do not a bit. I am disgusted with you, and will not cease till I have absolutely floored you. I do not care; you may struggle; but I am the stronger.

Ah, England! Have I not seen, do I not see now, plain as day, through thy midst the genius of thy true life wandering—he who can indeed, who can alone, save thee—

Seeking thy soul, thy real life, out of so much rubbish to disentangle?

Plaintive the Divine Child haply a moment by some cottage door, or by the side of some mechanic at his bench, lingering, passes on;

Through the great magnificent land, through its parks and country palaces and bewildering splendors of the resorts of wealth and learning, shy and plaintive, passes:

Is there no hand held out?

23Do not the learned people know him? Have the wealthy nothing to give? Will not the philanthropic reach a hand to this one?

The guides are all talking. They are settling the affairs of the universe. [They never cease.]

They have not settled yet which way to go themselves: how shall they give help to an ignorant child?

They are busy moreover distributing money and pamphlets: and surely nothing more can be needed.

They are very busy. They are worn out and rest not. Their faces are without sleep.

Nevertheless they go on. Was it said that any man could be contented? It is a lie;—or happy? It is mere foolishness. These things are the dreams of youthful ignorance.

The affairs of the universe and the continual fluctuations of the Stock Exchange are too great an anxiety.

Meanwhile the old woman was staggering homeward under a load of sticks—but none offered to relieve her of her burden. But indeed when you think of it, how could they? for it would have spoiled their clothes.

The poor boy was taken with a fit upon the doorstep, but it was best not to take him all dirty and slavering into the nicely-carpeted house!

The criminal had suffered shipwreck in life and was deserted; but of course it would not have done to be seen consorting with him.

24O happy happy guides! to whom such mighty issues are confided!

Happy happy Child! who need not stay to hear the end of their talk! whom I saw, in vision, silent and musing within itself, pass away from among those people.

XVI

Will you continually deny yourself, you? Will you for ever turn aside? These are not the times, remember, of canary birds—when the thunder growls along the horizon.

O England, do I not know thee—as in a nightmare strangled tied and bound?

Thy poverty—when through thy filthy courts from tangles of matted hair gaunt women with venomous faces look upon me?

When I see the thin joyless faces of their children, and the brick walls scarcely recognisable as brick for dirt, and the broken windows; when I breathe the thick polluted air in which not even plants will live; when oaths and curses are yelled in my ears, and the gibbering face of drink starts upon me at every corner;

When I turn from this and consider throughout the length and breadth of the land, not less but more hateful, the insane greed of riches—of which poverty and its evils are but the necessary obverse and counterpart;

When I see deadly Respectability sitting at its dinner table, quaffing its wine, and discussing the rise and fall of stocks; when I see the struggle, the fear, the envy, the profound infidelity (so profound that it is almost unconscious of itself) in which the moneyed classes live;

25When the faces of their children come to me pleading, pleading—every bit as much as the children of the city poor—pleading for one touch of nature: Of children who have been stuffed with lies all their lives, who have been told that they cannot do without this and that and a thousand things—all of which are wholly unnecessary, and a nuisance, (as who should tell one that it were not safe to walk on the naked Earth, but only on ground embarrassed with straw and all manner of rubbish up to one’s knees;)

Of children who have been taught to mix the nonsense manners and diarrhœa of drawing-rooms with their ideals of right and wrong; to despise manual labor and to reverence ridicule; to eat and drink and dress and sleep in unbelief and against all their natural instincts; and in all things to mingle the disgust of repletion with the very thought of pleasure—till their young judgments are confused and their instincts actually cease to be a guide to them;

Of strong healthy boys who positively believe they will starve unless they enter the hated professions held out to them;

When I see avenues of young girls and women, with sideway flopping heads, debarred from Work, debarred from natural Sexuality, weary to death with nothing to do, (and this thy triumph, O deadly respectability discussing stocks!)

When I see, flickering around, miserable spectrums and nostrums of reform—mere wisps devoid of all body—philanthropic chatterboxes, [Nay, I do not hold with you! For if you kill me to death talking to me in a drawing-room, what in the name of heaven are you going to do to the unfortunate in hospital?]

26When I hear and see the droning and see-sawing of pulpits; when the vision of perfect vulgarity and commonplaceness arises upon me—of society—and of that which arrogates to itself the sacred name of England;

The puppet dance of gentility—condescension, white hands, unsoiled dress, charitable proprietorship—in the street, the barracks, the church, the shop, the house, the school, the assembly,

In eating drinking and saying Good morning and Good night—of the theory of what it is to be a lady or a gentleman;

Of exclusiveness, and of being in the swim; of the drivel of aristocratic connections; of drawing-rooms and levees and the theory of animated clothespegs generally; of belonging to clubs and of giving pence to crossing-sweepers without apparently seeing them; of helplessly living in houses with people who feed you, dress you, clean you, and despise you; of driving in carriages; of being intellectual; of prancing about and talking glibly on all subjects on the theory of setting things right—and leaving others to do the dirty work of the world; of having read books by the score, and being yet unable to read a single page; of writing, and yet ignorant how to sign your name; of talking about political economy and politics and never having done a single day’s labor in your life; of being a magistrate or a judge and never having committed a common crime, or been in the position to commit one; of being a parson and afraid to be seen toping with Christ in a public; a barrister and to travel in a third class carriage; an officer and to walk with one of your own men;

27When I see the sea, spreading, of infidelity, of belief in externals—in money, big guns, laws, views, accomplishments, cheap goods—towncouncilors, cabinet ministers, M.P.’s, generals, judges, bishops—all alike;

When I look for help from the guides and see only a dead waste of aimless abject closeshaven shabby simpering flat pompous peaked punctilious faces:

O England, whither—strangled tied and bound—whither whither art thou come?

XVII

I choke!

[Or should choke—did I not know very well I could tear all these bonds to pieces like withes of dry grass: did I not know too that these are after all in place as they are, nor could be better than they are:

The natural sheath protecting the young bud—fitting close, stranglingly close, till the young thing gains a little more power, and then falling dry, useless, their work finished, to the ground.]

Strangled, O God? Nay—the circle of gibbering faces draws closer, the droning noises become louder, the weight gets heavier, unbearable—One instant struggle! and lo!

It is Over!—daylight! the sweet rain is falling and I hear the songs of the birds.

Blessings and thanks for ever for the sweet rain; blessings for the fresh fresh air blowing, and the meadows illimitable and the grass and the clouds;

28Blessings and thanks for you, you wild waters eternally flowing: O come flowing, encroaching, over me, in my ears: I salute you who are pure and sweet (ah! what designs, what love, are hid within you!)—

I praise you for your faithfulness for ever.

XVIII

To descend, first;

To feel downwards and downwards through this wretched maze of shams for the solid ground—to come close to the Earth itself and those that live in direct contact with it;

To identify, to saturate yourself with these, their laws of being, their modes of life, their needs (the Earth’s also), thoughts, temptations and aspirations;

This—is it not the eternal precept?—is the first thing: to dig downwards. Afterwards the young shoot will ascend—and ascending easily part aside the overlying rubbish.

These are not the times of canary birds—nor of trifling with art and philosophy and impertinent philanthropic schemes; this is the time of grown Men and Women:

Of or among the people; always living close to the earth and the people, and creating what they create, out of them.

Young Men and Women, I—though not of myself alone—call you: the time is come. (Is not the sweet rain falling?)

29You—for whom the bitter cup and the sweet are so strangely mixed—how strangely none but you can tell;

You—in whom divine strength is one with the uttermost weakness;

In soberness of spirit, as to some long and patient task in death alone ending, I call.

Strong in peace, strong in turmoil and conflict, strong in yourselves, undaunted, with large hearts, with large strong hands,

Spreaders of health (better than any doctor) to individuals, to the diseased prostrate nation, sustainers of ridicule, clearers of the ground laden with the accumulated wreck and rubbish of centuries,

Lovers of all handicrafts and of labor in the open air, confessed passionate lovers of your own sex,

Arise!

Heroes of the enfranchisement of the body (latest and best gift long concealed from men), Arise!

As the North wind in summer runs over the world, making a clear light down to the very horizon—so is the world prepared for you.

Come! I too call you. I too have looked in your eyes, O you of great faith and few words; you cannot escape, now.

Under your eyelids I have seen, shy, hidden away, pure without taint, one with the fresh air to sweeten all the world—lo! the greatest faith of all.

30You sacred ones, first interpreters, you holders up of new ideals, you greatest and least,

You who are and by your mere presence create Democracy—Arise!

Thou Woman, gentleborn and sensitive, yet incapable of being shocked or disgusted—Arise!

Thou one strong Man in love sufficient, out of the heart of the people—Arise!

XIX

Heroes, lovers, judges; despised, outcast, ridiculed; princes and kings and destitute; drudges and slaves; mothers, free women and feminine neuters; actors, parsons, squires, capitalists, rich dinners, fine houses (it is all the same: I go back upon my own words), the parks and the opera; unobtrusive, unguessed, day by day, and year by year; talking loud, talking soft, in the fashion, and out; dreaming of duty, love, release, nature, organisation, hatred, death; ascetic, lusty, genial, maimed, incoherent, proud; by tradition military, money-broking, official, commercial, idle, literary, church, chapel and club; in all forms and in all places; weary yet unwearied; before dawn rising and through the window peering at the untroubled sky; weak yet indomitable; suffering yet filled with exceeding joy—

Age after age, under the Earth, hidden, the womb of the dead generations arising to life again, myriads of seeds, chrysalids, pupæ, cysts, rootlets, transparent white bulbs of souls in Hades, by faith working many miracles; thrills of 31magnetism through the whole vast frame, summer heat and winter cold and the kiss of the living air; death and decay and weakness and prostration and poisonous inbreaths, and nearer nearer nearer nearer life and joy everlasting.

Through the city crowd pushing wrestling shouldering, against the tide, face after face, breath of liquor, money-grubbing eye, infidel skin, shouts, threats, greetings, smiles, eyes and breasts of love, breathless, clutches of lust, limbs, bodies, torrents, bursts, savage onslaughts, tears, entreaties, tremblings, stranglings, suicidal, the sky, the houses, surges and crests of waves, white faces from afar bearing down nearer nearer, almost touching, and glances unforgotten and meant to be unforgotten.

XX

I do not forget you: I see you quite plainly.

Tangles of social claims, convenances, toy-duties, fine soft-carpeted house, array of servants, failing and failing health, growing and settled sadness, ennui, wearisome pleasures, hyper-sensitiveness.

Golden hand-cuffs, the prison life of Custom without one touch of nature, desperate beating of wings and breast against the bars, trailing slime and winding web of lies impossible to escape from.

Careful obediences; sleek hat and well-brushed coat; blameless deference to public opinion; the desk, the counter, the Exchange, the walk home, the favorable comments of passers-by;

32And within, blinding burning hatred, bottomless yawning pits opening in the midst of life—of love, of jealousy, of desire—vast gales and whirlwinds carrying away the superstructure and the plans of years.

Waves and storms of the ocean within; shipwreck and disaster of life; fortune, health, honor, love, gone down seeming irretrievably in the great signless waste; and still the stars shining calm on the flying spray, and the immense placid heaven unmoved going back to innumerable other worlds and radiant birth-places and pilgrimages and possessions of the Soul without end.

XXI

I do not forget you. I see you quite plainly.

But why should one god leave his throne to scrape favors at the feet of other gods?

Surely it is enough to be here—and always to be Here.

I weave these words about myself to form a seamless web without beginning or ending. I do not spin a yarn for you to reel off at your leisure; nor do I pour out water into pots.

This is one of my bodies—of the female—which if you penetrate with true sexual power, clinging it shall conceive, and you shall know me in part—by the answer of the eyes of children, yours and mine, looking up from the grass and down from the sky upon you as you walk.

And if you understand me I will draw you away from all sorrow—so that no evil can happen to you. Not at first will it be so, but afterwards, after a time.

33

XXII

You cannot escape me (and this place of my Presence I will never leave till I have saturated myself, till the waves of my love have traveled over the whole vast ocean of existence from where I stand):

The horse galloping over the plains cannot escape the plains it gallops over.

Leagues and leagues out in the sunlight I lie, the winds of heaven blow over me—I desire nothing more, I am perfectly content.

Yes, you cannot escape me.

At night I creep down and lie close in the great city—there I am at home—hours and hours I lie stretched there; the feet go to and fro, to and fro, beside and over me.

Oaths and curses and obscene jokes; the group of laughing men and girls tumbling out of the doors of the beershop, the haggard old woman under the flaring gas-jet by the butcher’s stall (the butcher sometimes gives her a bit of waste meat in charity), the butcher himself with his smooth grisled hair and florid face—you cannot escape me.

You, soaring yearning face of youth threading the noisy crowd, though you soar to the stars you cannot escape me.

I remain where I am. I make no effort. Wherever you go it is the same to me: I am there already.

The murmuring of many voices is in my ears. As I lie on my side hour after hour the drowse of myriads of feet is upon me:

34Hour after hour, hour after hour,—and I sleep, well content.

XXIII

Closer and closer will I come, till I lay hold of you—myself and none other.

As one grasps a drowning man with a grasp that will not be relaxed, so will I grasp you—you shall not escape me.

Ah! Death, and Hell with thy gaping jaws, into thee at length I am curious to descend; curious am I to go where the old empty masks of Fear and Disaster are kept, and to see where they hang—hereafter useless for ever.

XXIV

Are you laughed at, are you scorned? Do they gaze at you and giggle to each other as you pass by? Do they despise you because you are mis-shapen, because you are awkward, because you are peculiar, because you fail in everything you do—and you know it is true?

Do you go to your chamber and hide yourself and think that no one thinks of you, or when they do only with contempt?

My child, there is One that not only thinks of you, but who cannot get on at all without you.

Are you alone in the world?

Have you sinned? have you a terrible secret within you which must out, yet you dare not reveal it?

Have you a face so disfigured that no one will look straight in your eyes?

35Have you a mortal disease? do you feel the beating pulse of it in the dead of the night? At midday when the passers by go to and fro in the bright sunshine, do you feel the shadowy call of it to another world?

Are you tormented with inordinate clutching lusts which you dare not speak? are you nearly mad with the sting of them, and nearly mad with terror lest they should betray you?

My child, there is One who understands perfectly. There is nothing betrayed, and there is nothing to betray.

It is all straightforward.

There is no fraction of your days, your body, your thoughts, your passions, which has not deliberately and calmly been prepared—and which shall not deliberately and calmly be removed again when it has played its part.

There is no prejudice here, or weakness or self-righteousness, nor any apartness at all;

You are included, and all that is done and felt by you is done and felt at the same instant by not you;

Whatever you are and whatever you do, there is One who will and does look you candidly in the face, and understands you.

You may recoil from that gaze; but if you learn to encounter and return it (whether in one or many lifetimes) you will see that from it at length all secret terrors, shams, disfigurements, death itself, vanish away;

And you will not only not be alone in the world, but you will be a sovereign lord over the world.

36

XXV

Apart from all evil—from all that seems to you evil—your Soul, my friend, that towards which you aspire, which will become you one day—your true Self—rides,

Above your phantasmal self continually.

Do not fear: it is there.

Through all the baffling and confusion, through all the seeming haphazard and labyrinth darkness of life, it is there—overseeing; quietly selecting, directing, ordaining. It is lord of all.

If there were chance, it were evil: but there is not. The soul surrounds chance and takes it captive;

And all experience—what you call good and what you call evil, alike—it takes and greedily absorbs, nor ever can have enough.

Are you not sometimes aware of your own body how it goes about, moving hither and thither? are you not aware of it in the street among others, exchanging greetings (and those who exchange the greetings absolutely equal before you)?

Are you not aware of it at night, lying awake, perhaps in pain? Are you not aware of it wandering over the hills at sunrise, or out at sea—in the agonised white faces of the people on board—and the ship is foundering?

Are you not aware of it North and South, East and West, by day and night, in winter and summer, in childhood and in age, gathering, culling, assimilating, without end, and with unerring instinct?

37And You, all the time—YOU?

What?—Like some great Egyptian King-God, seated, marble, with wide eyes looking out over the procession, chariots and horsemen, which creeps past in his honour—over them to the plains and the winding river.

Do not fear; do not be discouraged by the tiny insolences of people. For yourself be only careful that you are true.

The dreams of the dark-faced yearning swift-souled Egyptians, conceiving into stone eternal types of calm passion, the dreams of Pheidias, the dreams of the dreamers of all the earth falling passionate before the visionary beauty of womanhood and manhood—Are true.

The dust, the wretched blur and distortion are but for a moment. They are no more than they are. When you shall behold yourself in the clean mirror of God you shall be wholly satisfied.

The body is a root of the soul. As the body in air, so the soul sustains itself in love.

The medium in which the Knowledge of Yourself subsists is Equality. When you have penetrated into that medium (as the young shoot penetrates into the sunlight) you shall know that it is so—you shall realise Yourself—but not till then.

Hereafter the face of Nature, the faces of the sea and the fields, the faces of the animals—hereafter the faces of them that pass in the street—are changed.

Nothing escapes, the line is cast over them all, they 38cannot choose but yield themselves—to you, my friend—delivering the essence of their life to you.

Hereafter certain things, all-important before, become indifferent; certain thoughts with which you had tormented yourself torment you no longer; the chains fall off. On the other hand the ways which were forbidden and inaccessible become accessible—on all hands the doors stand open to your touch.

XXVI

Wonderful! The doors that were closed stand open. Yet how slight a thing it is.

The upturning of a palm? the curve of a lip, an eyelid? Nothing.

Nothing that can be seen with the mortal eye or heard by the ear, nothing that can be definitely thought, spoken, or written in a book—

Yet the doors that were trebled-bolted and barred, and the doors weed-overgrown and with rusty old hinges,

Fly open of themselves.

XXVII

Did you once desire to shine among your peers—or did you shrink from the knowledge of your own defect in the midst of them?

Did you, friend, covet so to be more beautiful, witty, virtuous—to be able to tell a story or sustain an argument well, or to be able to discourse on any subject, or to be a skilful rider or a good shot?

39Or shrank from the ridicule which the reverse of these excited—which was certain and is still certain to come upon you?

Was it really your own anxious face you used to keep catching in the glass? was it really you who had so many things, one way or another, you wanted to conceal from others—so many opinions too to disguise?

All that is changed now.

But what if your prayers had been granted? What if you had become exceptional and had secured for yourself a place with the strong and the gifted and the beautiful?

What if when you arrived the eyes of all had been turned upon you; and when you had passed by—one by one, sad, thoughtful, depressed, the weak more conscious of his or her weakness, the stupid more conscious of stupidity, the deformed more painfully conscious of his or her deformity, to their solitary chambers they had gone apart and prayed they had never been born?

What if you had taken advantage of the weak and defenceless and oppressed of the whole Earth—and had bartered away belief in the Soul standing omnipotent in the most despised things?

What if you had gladly disguised and covered your own defect, allowing thus the ignorant ridicule of the world to fall more heavily on those who could not or would not act a lie?

What if you had been a rank deserter, a cowardly slave, taking refuge always with the stronger side?

Ah! what if to one weary traveler in the world, in the 40steep path painfully mounting, you making it steeper still had added the final stone of stumbling and despair?

Better to be effaced, crazy, criminal, deformed, degraded.

Better instead of the steep to be the most dull flat and commonplace road.

Better to go clean underfoot of all weak and despised persons—so that they shall not even notice that you are there;

None so rude and uneducated but you shall go underfoot of them, none so criminal but you shall when the occasion serves go underfoot of them, none so outcast but they shall pass along you and not even notice that you are there.

XXVIII

The undistinguished old Earth! the dusty clods!

The mere brown handfuls crumbled through the fingers, out of which proceed the trees and the grasses and the animals roaming through them, and man with his vast-aspiring religions and civilisations.

The common and universal;

The servant girl tying up her hair before the broken mirror hung from a nail in the wall; the daisy child-face looking at you from the side of the path as you pass; the slow humor of old gaffers on the village seat in the sun:

These contain you. With all your ambitions you cannot escape and go beyond these. It is impossible.

The bride attiring herself in her white veil, the brilliant and admired wit of the salons, the mathematician in his study, cannot go beyond these,

41Any more than the earth can go beyond and fly out of space. It is impossible; it is unthinkable.

Far around and beyond whatever is exceptional and illustrious in human life stretches that which is average and unperceived;

All distinctions, all attainments, all signal beauty, skill, wit, and whatever a man can exhibit in himself, swim and are lost in that great ocean.

The subtle learning of the learned, the beauty of the exceptionally beautiful, the wit of the witty, the fine manners and customs of the courtly—all these things proceed immediately out of the common and undistinguished people and those who stand in direct contact with Nature, and return into them again.

The course of all is the same; they are tossed up thinner and thinner, into mere spray at last—like a wave from the breast of the Ocean—and fall back again.

You try to set yourself apart from the vulgar. It is in vain. In that instant vulgarity attaches itself to you.

If it did not, you would cease to exist.

XXIX

Gold is not finer than lead, nor lead than gold (every atom of each has its own life movement intelligence, and ridicules epithets);

The stars are not more human to the soul than is the deep background of Night behind them. And what would the shoal of merry leaping children playing there in the sun 42be without the mother-love in which they swim all the while as in an ocean?

To be Yourself, to have measureless Trust; to enjoy all, to possess nothing.

That which you have, your skill, your strength, your knack of pleasant thoughts—they belong to all. It is a fact, and the others looking on you know it.

That which you have not, your scornful defects, your dumbnesses, your aches and pains and silent hours of suffering, to understand that you can give of them too, inexhaustible store—as the old brown earth gives out of her heart, to men; and she knows it, but they do not know it.

To walk along the path which has an equal good on either hand; to give the sign of equality;

To entertain no possible fear or doubt about the upshot of things—to be Yourself, to have measureless Trust:

Perhaps that is best of all.

XXX

Curious how much—and the disentangling of self—depends upon Ideals!

Who is this, for instance, easy with open shirt, and brown neck and face—the whites of his eyes just seen in the sultry twilight—through the city garden swinging?

The fountain plashes cool in its basin, and mixes its murmur with the sound of feet going to and fro upon graveled walks;

The massed foliage above catches the evening light, 43catches the rising wind, and sways like the sea on a calm day; the voices of children are heard—but who is this?

[Who anyhow is he that is simple and free and without afterthought? who passes among his fellows without constraint and without encroachment, without embarrassment and without grimaces, and does not act from motives?

Who is ignorant or careless of what is termed politeness, who makes life wherever he goes desirable, and removes stumbling-blocks instead of creating them?]

Grave and strong and untamed,

This is the clear-browed unconstrained tender face, with full lips and bearded chin, this is the regardless defiant face I love and trust;

Which I came out to see, and having seen do not forget.

And not I alone.

See! on the little public round the fountain scattered—on the seats lounging, or walking to and fro—the strange effect!

The dressed-up man of the world eyes him curiously—and does not forget;

The pale student eyes him: he envies his healthy face and unembarrassed manner;

The delicate lady sees him well, though she does not seem to; secretly now she loathes her bejeweled lord and desires piteously the touch of this man’s muscular lithe sun-embrowned body;

The common people salute him as their equal and call him by his name; the children know him: they run after him and catch him by the hand.

44Curious! how all the poetry, the formative life, of the scene—the rushing scent of the lime trees, the evening light, the swaying of the foliage, the rustle of feet below,

The yearning threads of the fine lady’s life—how the sympathy of the little public by the fountain—all gathers round this figure.

There was a time when the sympathy and the ideals of men gathered round other figures;

When the crowned king, or the priest in procession, or the knight errant, or the man of letters in his study, were the imaginative forms to which men clung;

But now before the easy homely garb and appearance of this man as he swings past in the evening, all these others fade and grow dim. They come back after all and cling to him.

And this is one of the slowly unfolded meanings of Democracy.

XXXI

The world travels on—and shall travel on.

A few centuries shall not exhaust the meanings of it. In you and me too, inevitably, its meanings wait their unfolding.

No old laws, precedents, combinations of men or weapons, can retard it; no new laws, schemes, combinations, discoveries, can hasten it; but only the new births within the Soul, you and me.

Sacred for this is the Day and sacred is the Night, sacred are Life and Death because, O wonderful, of this!

When Yes has once been pronounced in that region 45then the No of millions is nothing at all; then fire, the stake, death, ridicule, and bitter extermination, are of no avail whatever;

When the Ideal has once alighted, when it has looked forth from the windows with ever so passing a glance upon the Earth, then we may go in to supper, you and I, and take our ease—the rest will be seen to;

When a new desire has declared itself within the human heart, when a fresh plexus is forming among the nerves—then the revolutions of nations are already decided, and histories unwritten are written.

XXXII

I charge you, O traveler, that you disbelieve not—a voice comes in the cool of the evening:

I charge you that in the secret unspoken word you disbelieve not, sacred, and the first almighty Thing,

Moving among cities and over the open sea—advancing to deliverance in us;

Night and day, youth and old age, willing and unwilling—advancing to deliverance in us.

Dumb and of no account, her beauty now and then only (or at night when no one is near) before the glass disrobing, trembling, lonely, unresponded—yet mightier than all the array and splendor of the Earth—I charge you that you do not disbelieve!

Outwards all proceeds: Brahma from himself sheds and shreds the universes; I from myself, you from yourself.

46To-day the slave goes first, in his chains, and the voiceless, and those that are without arguments and always in the wrong;

And the prisoner with slouched head, and the suspected and insulted in rags, and those whose hearts bleed silently because of what they see;

And the old forsaken mother, and the cast-aside woman, and the child, and the favorless and the drunkard shall go first;

The mechanic to-day shall go before his master, the bricklayer shall be saluted in the street before the architect, the navvy shall be accounted more than the politician, and I will give the illiterate the advantage of those that read and write.

The scouted and the exiled and the unheard-of, laborers in the fields and in mines, quarrymen and limekilners and brickburners and makers and cleaners of drains and household drudges, shall be nearest in honor: the burdened of every day, and the sufferers, the over-worked and hope-forlorn, and the concealers of sin and sorrow and despair, shall head the procession.

And with them One (of whom I have spoken) moving unseen hither and thither—side by side first with one and then with another—shall resume and make all plain, shall be himself the beginning and ending of it all.

XXXIII

When He descends, when He comes to take dominion—

Do you think that anything else will do? do you think that he will perhaps be put off by offers sufficiently liberal, and arguments?

47Do you think that he will be deeply impressed by your grave How, how? and It cannot be?—or that he will ascend into your high houses and take his ease with you, and lounge smoking and looking wearily at the sky till he forgets what he has come for?

Do you think he will pay great attention to your hat and boots, or to what they write before or after your name, or to what they say of you next door—or will ask what church you go to, or what conventicle or schism-shop, or enquire into the soundness of your investments?

Do you think he will drive about with you in your carriages dispensing charities like an Oriental prince—and occasionally even say a few words to the coachman—or that it will be pretence or mere kindly patronage if he prefers the coachman’s company to yours?

Do you think that perhaps he will be very bland and gentle, and never be rude or coarsely dressed, and that he will be highly interested in what you tell him, and that he won’t at a single look know all that ever you did?

Do you suppose that he will not know which is the top and which is the bottom of things, or that he will be impressed by your cleverness and smart repartees, or that he will reckon you up by the number of books you have read?

Do not deceive yourself—for it is yourself that you are trying to deceive—not Him.

XXXIV

The magistrate sits on the bench, but he does not exercise judgment; the doctor dispenses medicine but has 48heard no tidings of what health is; the parson opens his mouth, but no intelligible sound comes forth; the merchant distributes evils just the same as goods.

Do you suppose it is all for nothing that disbelief has gone out over the world; that weariness has taken possession of the souls of the rich, and that fatal darkness enfolds the head of wealth and education;

That men disbelieve in the human heart and think that the source of power is set otherwhere than in its burning glowing depths: that the powers which they worship are but so many withered emblems of power—dead scoriæ nodding and jostling over the living lava-stream?

Do you suppose it is all for nothing that the eyes of brothers avoid in the street, and none sees what is before him; that the heel is upon the head, and Earth alone regards the faces of them that are oppressed—that the stones in the wintry fields are become confidants, and the ground is sown with compressed thought, like seeds?

[When yet there is peace over the world, as of the Sea swooning away into its hollows; and differences are sullen like rocks at ebb-tide, and brackish dismal mudflats lie between, and the sun stands motionless overhead, and Contempt trickles malarious, and Avoidance and Negation and Fear loom up against the sky, and men cling like rotting weeds about their bases, and the soul stifles for the swingeing life of the waves and the breath of the wind that blows from one end of the world to the other.]

Do you suppose it means nothing that that which satisfied once satisfies now no more (not till the whole round has 49been made), but unrest and hunger are eating through men’s souls?

That a new need gone up is more than all precedent, and History shrivels before the will, even if it be only of one man; that the pilgrimage has begun, and men are leaving their long-loved homes by thousands—and the tenderest-hearted are the first to sever the old ties?

That centuries of suffering have compressed thought and purpose into one—till they are harder than rock; so that you shall remove mountains, but you shall not remove the word which has gone forth?

That expediency and logic expostulate in vain, and man has become wholly unreasonable, and is calm to drop utility into the bottomless pit; and the wise cover their lights, but the fools flash theirs and are whirled away—like fireflies in a thunderstorm?

Do you suppose it means nothing when the godlike Hand comes forth—the awful hand, sacred with the kisses of the generations of men?

When the hand of Necessity comes forth from the cloud and covers dark the faces of them who have never known it, turning them back from their ruin—but stands in the clear sky, beckoning bright, like a pillar of fire for weary fugitives?

When the awful vision moves across the sky, and the earth is electric under it—and the grass stands stiffly, and the blue thistle in the hedge is erect with meaning,

And men are amorous for the naked stinging touch of the world, and to wrestle limb to limb with the wind and the waves;

50When poverty and hardship smile for their espousal, and fierce endurance is fused in one passion with love, and the glitter of concealment is torn away, and the loins are compressed and the eyes aflame with lust,

Towards that which shall surely be born?

When Wealth is slowly and visibly putrefying and putrefying the old order of things;

When the surface test is final—the rainbow-colored scum—and society rotting down beneath it; a trick of clothing or speech, metallic chink in the pocket, white skin, soft hands, fawning and lying looks—everywhere the thrust of rejection, the bond of redemption nowhere; the sacred gifts all violated stale and profaned—men and women falling off from them listless, like satiated leeches;

When Labor is not loyal and true, nor the Laborers loyal and true to each other; when a man has no pride in the creation of his hands, nor rejoices to make it perfect; when machinery is perfectly organised and human souls are hopelessly disorganised;

Do you think all these things mean nothing?

XXXV

Ah, England! Ah, beating beating heart!

No wonder you are weary! weary of talk!

Weary seeking amid the scramble, amid the scramble of words and the scramble of wealth,

Amid the fashionable, the scientific, the artistic, the commercial, the political, the learned and literary scramble—weary,

51Seeking, seeking, seeking for a God!

As it ever was and will be—

As a thief in the night, silently and where you least expect,

Unlearned perhaps, without words, without arguments, without influential friends or money—leaning on himself alone—

Without accomplishments and graces, without any liniments for your old doubts, or recipes for constructing new theological or philosophical systems—

With just the whole look of himself in his eyes—

The Son of Man shall—yes, shall—appear in your midst. O beating heart, your lover and your judge shall appear.

He will not bring a new revelation; he will not at first make any reply to the eager questions about death and immortality; he will present no stainless perfection;

But he will do better: he will present something absolute, primal—the living rock—something necessary and at first hand, and men will cling to him therefor;

He will restore the true balance; he will not condemn, but he will be absolute in himself;

He will be the terrible judge to whom every one will run;

He will be the lover and the judge in one.

The Son of Man—

Ponder well these words.

After all I cannot explain them: it is impossible to explain that which is itself initial and elementary.

You will look a thousand times before you see that which you are looking for—it is so simple—

52Not science, O beating heart, nor theology, nor rappings, nor philanthropy, nor high acrobatic philosophy,

But the Son—and so equally the Daughter—of Man.

XXXVI

I hear the sound of the whetting of scythes.

The beautiful grass stands tall in the meadows, mixed with sorrel and buttercups; the steamships move on across the sea, leaving trails of distant smoke. I see the tall white cliffs of Albion.

I smell the smell of the newmown grass, the waft of the thought of Death; the white fleeces of the clouds move on in the everlasting blue, with the dashing and the spray of waves below.

It comes and recedes again, and comes nearer—out of the waves and the tall white cliffs and the clouds and the grass.

XXXVII

The towers of Westminster stand up by the river, and, within, the supposed rulers contend and argue, but they hear nothing. It comes to them last.

The long lines of princely mansions stretch through Belgravia and Kensington—closelipped, deaf, plaguestricken.

Lines of carriages crowd the Park; tier above tier at the Opera are faces and flowers; there are clubs and literary cliques and entertainments, but of the voice of human joy, native once more in the world, there is scarcely a note.

53Over all the towns and villages of the land the fingers of the spires point dumb to the driving clouds.

York Minster stands up like a watchtower in the rising sun, and from the midst of its Roman walls looks out over leagues of meadows and cornfields; Salisbury stands up, and Ely lonesome among its old-world fens; but they report nothing seen.

From the Hoe at Plymouth the promenade loafers look down upon the decks of passing vessels; the line of the breakwater stretches, and the wild sea beyond;

The convicts, thousands, motionless-faced, in yellow-dressed gangs dot the thinly-grassed rocks and fortress walls of the Isle of Portland.

Victoria, the Queen, peers from the high windows of Osborne back upon Portsmouth crowded with shipping, and the grass downs of the Island that lies behind it.

The mail-steamers go to and fro, of Dover and Folkestone, the passengers arrive from the Continent, idlers are watching the arrivals, and police officers in disguise—but they report nothing;

Winchelsea and Rye stand forgotten by the water, on rocks beaten now only by the waving meadows; the old martello towers dot the long low shores.

Down the Thames with the tide the great vessels come swinging; St. Paul’s looks out upon them, white, in far glimpses over the great city; the sea-gulls dip and hover where the waters meet. The cutters of Yarmouth leave the river and make between the long sands for the open sea and the banks.

54

XXXVIII

England spreads like a map below me. I see the mud-flats of the Wash striped with water at low tide, the embankments grown with mugwort and sea-asters, and Boston Stump and King’s Lynn, and the squaresail brigs in the offing.

Beachy Head stands up beautiful, with white walls and pinnacles, from its slopes of yellow poppy and bugloss; the sea below creeps with a grey fog, the vessels pass and are folded out of sight within it. I hear their foghorns sounding.

Flamborough Head stands up, dividing the waves. Up its steep gullies the fishermen haul their boats; in its caves the waters make perpetual music.

I see the rockbound coast of Anglesey with projecting ribs of wrecks; the hills of Wicklow are faintly outlined across the water. I ascend the mountains of Wales; the tarns and streams lie silver below me, the valleys are dark. Moel Siabod stands up beautiful, and Trifan and Cader Idris in the morning air.

I descend the Wye, and pass through the ancient streets of Monmouth and of Bristol. I thread the feathery birch-haunted coombs of Somerset.

I ascend the high points of the Cotswolds, and look out over the rich vale of Gloucester to the Malvern hills, and see the old city clustering round its Church, and the broad waters of the Severn, and the distant towers of Berkeley Castle.

The river-streams run on below me. The broad deep-bosomed Trent through rich meadows full of cattle, under tall shady trees runs on. I trace it to its birthplace in the 55hills. I see the Derbyshire Derwent darting in trout-haunted shallows over its stones. I taste and bathe in the clear brown moor-fed water.

I see the sweet-breathed cottage homes and homesteads dotted for miles and miles and miles. It comes near to them. I enter the wheelwright’s cottage by the angle of the river. The door stands open against the water, and catches its changing syllables all day long; roses twine, and the smell of the woodyard comes in wafts.

The Castle rock of Nottingham stands up bold over the Trent valley, the tall flagstaff waves its flag, the old market-place is full of town and country folk. The river goes on broadening seaward. I see where it runs beneath the great iron swing-bridges of railroads, there are canals connecting with it, and the sails of the canal-boats gliding on a level with the meadows.

The great sad colorless flood of the Humber stretches before me, the low-lying banks, the fog, the solitary vessels, the brackish marshes and the water-birds; Hull stretches with its docks, vessels are unlading—bags of shell-fish, cargoes of oranges, timber, fish; I see the flat lands beyond Hull, and the enormous flights of pewits.

The Thames runs down—with the sound of many voices. I hear the sound of the saw-mills and flour-mills of the Cotswolds, I can see racing boats and hear the shouts of partisans, villages bask in the sun below me; Sonning and Maidenhead; anglers and artists are hid in nooks among tall willow-herbs; I glide with tub and outrigger past flower-gardens, meadows, parks; parties of laughing girls handle 56the oars and tiller ropes; Teddington, Twickenham, Richmond, Brentford glide past; I hear the songs, I hear Elizabethan echoes; I come within sound of the roar of London.

I see the woodland and rocky banks of the Tavy and the Tamar, and of the arrowy Dart. The Yorkshire Ouse winds sluggish below me; afar off I catch the Sussex Ouse and the Arun, breaking seaward through their gaps in the Downs; I look down from the Cheshire moors upon the Dee.

In their pride the beautiful cities of England stand up before me; from the midst of her antique elms and lilac and laburnum haunted gardens the grey gateways and towers of Cambridge stand up; ivy-grown Warwick peeps out of thick foliage; I see Canterbury and Winchester and Chester, and Worcester proud by her river-side, and the ancient castles—York and Lancaster looking out seaward, and Carlisle; I see the glistening of carriage wheels and the sumptuous shine of miles of sea frontage at Brighton and Hastings and Scarborough; Clifton climbs to her heights over the Avon; the ruins of Whitby Abbey are crusted with spray.

I hear the ring of hammers in the ship-yards of Chatham and Portsmouth and Keyham, and look down upon wildernesses of masts and dock-basins. I see the observatory at Greenwich and catch the pulses of star-taken time spreading in waves over the land. I see the delicate spider-web of the telegraphs, and the rush of the traffic of the great main lines, North, West, and South. I see the solid flow of business men northward across London Bridge in the morning, and the ebb at evening. I see the eternal systole and 57diastole of exports and imports through the United Kingdom, and the armies of those who assist in the processes of secretion and assimilation—and the great markets.

I explore the palaces of dukes—the parks and picture galleries—Chatsworth, Hardwicke, Arundel; and the numberless old Abbeys. I walk through the tall-windowed hospitals and asylums of the great cities and hear chants caught up and wandering from ward to ward.

I see all over the land the beautiful centuries-grown villages and farmhouses nestling down among their trees; the dear old lanes and footpaths and the great clean highways connecting; the fields, every one to the people known by its own name, and hedgerows and little straggling copses, and village greens; I see the great sweeps of country, the rich wealds of Sussex and Kent, the orchards and deep lanes of Devon, the willow-haunted flats of Huntingdon, Cambridge and South Lincolnshire; Sherwood Forest and the New Forest, and the light pastures of the North and South Downs; the South and Midland and Eastern agricultural districts, the wild moorlands of the North and West, and the intermediate districts of coal and iron.

The oval-shaped manufacturing heart of England lies below me; at night the clouds flicker in the lurid glare; I hear the sob and gasp of pumps and the solid beat of steam and tilt-hammers; I see streams of pale lilac and saffron-tinted fire. I see the swarthy Vulcan-reeking towns, the belching chimneys, the slums, the liquor-shops, chapels, dancing saloons, running grounds, and blameless remote villa residences.

58I see the huge warehouses of Manchester, the many-storied mills, the machinery, the great bale-laden drays, the magnificent horses; I walk through the Liverpool Exchange; the brokers stand in knots; the greetings, the frock-coats, the rosebuds; the handling and comparing of cotton samples.

Leeds lies below me; I hear the great bell; I see the rush along Boar Lane and Briggate. I enter the hot machine shops, smelling of oil and wooldust. I see Sheffield among her hills, and the white dashing of her many water-wheels, and the sulphurous black cloud going up to heaven in her midst.

Newcastle I recognise, and her lofty bridge; and I look out over the river gates of the Mersey.

XXXIX

I see a great land poised as in a dream—waiting for the word by which it may live again.

I see the stretched sleeping figure—waiting for the kiss and the re-awakening.

I hear the bells pealing, and the crash of hammers, and see beautiful parks spread—as in toy show.

I see a great land waiting for its own people to come and take possession of it.

XL

The clouds fly overhead still, and the waves curdle in the blue beneath; the smell of the newmown grass comes, and the tall white cliffs stand up.

59All depends upon a Word spoken.

Do you think perhaps that there is no answer? do you think that the high lighthouses looking out over the water, the sea itself careering beyond them, that the ploughed lands, and the rocks that are hewn into great cities, are indifferent to who own, to who trespass upon them? that they are dumb, dead, and of no account?

Do you think that they have nothing to say to all this, that they will not deliver themselves upon whom they choose, that they have it not in their power to bless and to curse, ah! that they cannot repay love a hundredfold?

Do you not know that the streets, houses, public buildings of the city where you live, have tongues, arms, eyes? that they are on the watch? that the trees and streams around you are alive with answers, and that the common clay knows the tread of its true owner?

Do you think that England or any land will rise into life, will display her surpassing beauty, will pour out her love, to the touch of false owners—to people who finger banknotes, who make traffic, buying and selling her, who own by force of titledeeds, laws, police—who yet deny her, turning their backs upon her winds and her waves, and ashamed to touch her soil with their hands?

Do you think that she will arise to the call of these? O do you not know how she yearns for the mastery of her true owners, how she leans herself backward, displaying her charms, inviting—breathing courage even into faint souls to know their manhood—to come upon her boldly, to let none stand between?

60O know well that it shall be. That the land they dwell on, that the Earth, for whatsoever people is worthy, shall become impossible to be separated from them—even in thought.

Of those who are truly the People, they are jealous of their land; the woods and the fields and the open sea are covered with their love—inseparable from life.

Every hedgerow, every old lumb and coppice, the nature of the soils in every field and part of a field, the suffs, the bedrock, pastures, ploughlands and fallows; the quarries and places of the best stone for roadmending, building, walling, roofing, draining; the best stuff for mending footpaths; the best water for miles round, and the taste and quality of the various wells and springs; the clays for puddling and for brickburning, the basseting out and dips of the beds; the cattle and livestock up and down, their various breeds, treatment and condition; the moors, forests, streams, rivers, seacoasts, familiar by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and on dark nights—every nook and corner of them; the old trees and their histories, the waterside trees, and where pheasants frequently roost, and the places for netting rabbits and hares, or for spearing trout by lantern-light; or where the crab-apple and cluster-berry and mountain-flax and agrimony grow;

The haunts of the wild duck and snipe, the decoy of the corncrake, the nests of the storm-cock and the water-hen and the pewit; the legends told of old hollows and caves and crags; the bold and beautiful headlands, the taste of the air 61upon them; the old streets in the towns, and their histories, and the histories of the houses in them, and of those who lived in the houses; the old villages and their traditions, customs, specialties, notorious characters, feasts and frolics;

The knowledge of the arts of sea and river fishing, oyster and scallop dredging, the trawl, the seine and the drift-net, farming, fruit-growing, timbergrowing pilling and dressing, canal-making, sea-walling, ship-building, irrigation; the great crafts in stone, wood, iron—of the mason’s, the smith’s, the joiner’s, the tool-maker’s work; of the clean use of tools, of all faithful and perfect work, and the joy and majesty that comes of it—

Everything that the land has—calls an answer in the breasts of the people, and quickly grows love for the use of those that live on it.

Without this love no People can exist; this is the creation nourishment and defence of Nations. It is this that shall save England (as it has saved Ireland); which ultimately—of the very Earth—shall become the nurse of Humanity.

Between a great people and the earth springs a passionate attachment, lifelong—and the earth loves indeed her children, broad-breasted, broad-browed, and talks with them night and day, storm and sunshine, summer and winter alike.

[Here indeed is the key to the whole secret of education.]

Owners and occupiers then fall into their places; the trees wave proud and free upon the headlands; the little 62brooks run with a wonderful new music under the brambles and the grass.

[Determined—is the word henceforth—to worship nothing, no ownership, which is unreal; no title-deeds, money-smells, respectabilities, authorities;

To be arrogant, unpersuadable, faithful, free—not unworthy of the trees waving upon the high tops and of the earth rolling through the starlit night.]

Government and laws and police then fall into their places—the earth gives her own laws; Democracy just begins to open her eyes and peep! and the rabble of unfaithful bishops, priests, generals, landlords, capitalists, lawyers, kings, queens, patronisers and polite idlers goes scuttling down into general oblivion.

Faithfulness emerges, self-reliance, self-help, passionate comradeship.

Freedom emerges, the love of the land—the broad waters, the air, the undulating fields, the flow of cities and the people therein, their faces and the looks of them no less than the rush of the tides and the slow hardy growth of the oak and the tender herbage of spring and stiff clay and storms and transparent air.

All depends upon a word spoken or unspoken.

The clouds fly overhead still, and the smell of the new-mown grass is wafted by. It comes and recedes again.

I hear the awful syllable Change, and see all things, qualities, impersonations, gliding from the embraces of their own names; but I hear beyond;

63I hear beyond the sound of the hone and strickle, and look in the eyes of the Mower, under the shade of his broad straw hat.

It comes and recedes again, and comes nearer.

The little waves lip up against the great black ship as she glides down river—

O sailor sitting on a plank over the side, beware!

The ship itself, the rigging, the tidal river, the docks, the wharves, and long busy streets, and country beyond—the shows of life and death—

Who makes and who unmakes them?

I touch you lightly. I am the spray.

I touch you that you remember, and forget not who you are.

XLI

I look upon him who makes all things.

I sit at his feet in silence as he lights his pipe, and feel the careless resting of his fingers upon my neck.

I see the fire leaping in the grate; I see the nodding of grasses and blackberry sprays in the hedges; I hear the long surge and hush of the wind;

I hear his voice speaking to me.

O rivers and hills of Albion, O clouds that sail from the Atlantic to the North Sea, and wrinkled old Abbeys and modern towers and streets of heavily laden drays,

Behind your masks I am aware of an imperceptible change: surely it must be the appearance of a Face.

64

XLII

The word travels on.

I have been on tramp, and my boots are dusty and hobnailed, and my clothes are torn: do not ask me into your house; (God knows; I might spoon my food with a knife!)

Give me a penny on the doorstep and let me pass on. I have sat with you long, and loved you well, unknown to you, but now I go otherwhere.

XLIII

The word travels on.

Out of the mists of time, out of innumerable births, of endless journeys, transfigurements, lives, deaths, sorrows, emerging, my voice sounds to myself, to you, nearer than all thought: tentatively trying the first notes, wonderingly at its beauty, of the Song—strange word!—of Joy.

To spread abroad over the earth, to be realised in time: Freedom to be realised in time, for which the whole of History has been a struggle and a preparation:

The dream of the soul’s slow disentanglement.

[O Blessed is he that has passed away!

Blessed, alive or dead, whom the bitter taunts of existence reach not—nor betrayals protruded from dear faces, nor weariness nor cold nor pain—dwelling in heaven, and looking forth in peace upon the world.

Blessed, thrice blessed, by day, by night! Blessed who sleeps with him, blessed who eats walks talks, blessed 65who labors in the field beside him; blessed whoever, though he be dead, shall know him to be eternally near.]

I am the poet of hitherto unuttered joy.

A little bird told me the secret in the night, and henceforth I go about seeking to whom to whisper it.

I see the heavens laughing, I discern the half-hidden faces of the gods wherever I go, I see the transparent-opaque veil in which they hide themselves; yet I dare not say what I see—lest I should be locked up!

Children go with me, and rude people are my companions. I trust them and they me. Day and night we are together and are content.

To them what I would say is near; yet is it in nothing that can be named, or in the giving or taking of any one thing; but rather in all things.

Laughter, O laughter! O endless journey! O soul exhaled through suffering, arising free! Little bird petrel through the stormy seas diving darting—thy boundless home—O clouds and sunshine shattering! Elf in thine own dark eyes gazing! O beckoner of companions, hastening onward—winged spirit divine, girt round with laughter, laughter, laughter.

66

XLIV

I am come to be the interpreter of yourself to yourself;

[Do I not stand behind the sun and moon, do I not wait behind the air that you breathe, for this!]

Born beyond Maya I now descend into materials.

The dandelion by the path, and the pink buds of the sycamore, and the face of the sweep who comes to sweep your chimney, shall henceforth have a new meaning to you, (how do you know that I am not the chimney-sweep?)

The nettles growing against the gate post, and the dry log on the grass where you stop and sit, the faithful tool that is in your hand and the sweat on your forehead, the sound of the dear old village band across far fields—

These shall be for memorials between us, and I in them will surely draw towards you.

And to you, when I am dead, they shall deliver the words which still I had not sense and courage to speak. Hear them.

Where I was not faithful these shall be faithful to you; where I was vain and silly these shall look you clear of all vanity and silliness; where I was afraid to utter my thoughts dumb things shall utter for you words impossible to be misunderstood.

The sun shall shine, the clouds draw across the sky, the fire leap in the grate, the kettle boil—to purposes which you cannot fathom; the simplest shall look you in the 67face to meanings ever profounder and profounder than all Thought.

Behind them, behind the woven veil—accepting, not rejecting, my own vanities, cowardices, giving them also their due place—I too wait in silence, till the full-armed shall come to give me birth again.

XLV

In silence I wait and accept all—the glare of misapprehension I accept—I sit at the fashionable dinner-table and accept what is brought to me.

I am a painter on the house-side, the sight of the distant landscape pleases me, and the scraps of conversation caught from the street below. My back aches singling turnips through the long hot day; my fingers freeze getting potatoes.

I help the farmer drive his scared cattle home at midnight by the fitful flicker of lightning. I go mowing at early morning while the twilight creeps in the North East—I sleep in the hot hours—and mow again on into the night.

I am a seeing unseen atom traveling with others through space or remaining centuries in one place; again I resume a body and disclose myself.

I am one of the people who spend their lives sitting on their haunches in drawing-rooms and studies; I grow gradually feebler and fretfuler. I am a boy once more in tall hat and gloves walking wearily among crowds of well-dressed (hopelessly well-dressed) people, up and down a certain promenade.

I enter the young prostitute’s chamber, where he is 68arranging the photographs of fashionable beauties and favorite companions, and stay with him; we are at ease and understand each other.

I dance at the village feast in the upper room of a public; my partner shows me the steps and figures. The elderly harper, so noble and dignified, accompanies his son’s fiddle—or goes round to collect the pence—but all the while his thoughts are with his only daughter in Australia.

The wheel turns, but whatever it brings uppermost is well.

XLVI

I lie abed in illness, and experience strange extensions of spirit. I am close to those afar off, and the present and near at hand are discounted. I spend nights of pain and loneliness.

I dream of the beautiful life. I go down to the sea with fisher folk, and spend chill nights on the great deep under the stars; the sun rises on faces round me of freedom and experience. I see everywhere the old simple occupations—the making and mending of nets, the growing of flax and hemp, the tending of gardens, cattle—the old sweet excuses for existence, their meaning now partly understood—the faith that grows in the open air and out of all honest work till it surrounds and redeems the soul.

The blacksmith blows up his fire; he listens for the sound of the great heat. He taps the glowing iron in advance of the blows of the striker, and turns it deftly with the tongs.

The budder of roses bends among the low bushes; 69with a quick motion he flirts out the wood and binds the bud on the wild stock. The wire-weaver stands at his loom, working the treadles with his foot and throwing the shuttle with alternate hand.

The old coach-body maker stands at his bench, grey-haired, worn, thoughtful—the young apprentice comes down whistling from the trimming shop to ask him a question.

The sunlight streams in broad shafts through the chinks of the blinds into the carpenter’s shop; with grizzled beard and hair, and something of a stoop in his shoulders, the governor stands penciling out a fresh job; a tall young fellow sits astride of a door-style, cutting a mortise, and a dab of light on the floor sends a reflection up in his arch-humored face.

The bathers in the late twilight, almost dark, advance naked under the trees by the waterside, five or six together, superb, unashamed, scarcely touching the ground.

The budding pens of love scorch all over me—my skin is too tight, I am ready to burst through it—a flaming girdle is round my middle. Eyes, hair, lips, hands, waist, thighs—O naked mad tremors; in the dark feeding pasturing flames!

O soul, spreading, spreading—impalpable sunlight behind the sunlight!

The tall thin grey-bearded man I meet daily in the street—with lined brow, silent, full of experience;

The stout matron in the greengrocer’s shop, loquacious, clear-eyed, with clear indubitable voice;

The thick-thighed hot coarse-fleshed young bricklayer with the strap round his waist;

70The young printer (but he has a wife and family at home) with large dreamy projecting eyes, going absent, miles away, over his work—thinking of Swedenborg and the dance of atoms and angels;

The young woman at the refreshment bar, her thick light-colored hair, her well-formed features, and the bored look in her eyes as she returns the chaff of the carefully-dressed young man across the counter;

The military-looking official at the door of the hotel—the despondency of drink which he conceals beneath his loud-voiced smart exterior;

The ragged boy with rare intense eyes not to be misunderstood—in the midst of much dirt and ignorance the soul through suffering enfranchised, exhaled—here too shining like the sunlight, redeeming justifying all it lights on;

The slut of a girl who has become a mother, the ready doubt among her neighbors who was the father; the stupid loving way in which she crams the child to her breast—sitting on a stone by the fire-side utterly oblivious of opinion;

The good-natured fair-haired Titan at work in the fields; the little woman with large dark eyes who is so clever and managing among the poor, and with their children;

The thin close-lipped friz-haired commercial traveler, unwearied, walking long distances to save railway or coach fare, well posted in all local information for fifty miles round;

His wife, so comfortable and fore-thoughtful at home, so evil-tongued abroad, and the bevy of red-haired red-cheeked 71girls, well drilled in scrubbing and cooking, and not without a veneer of accomplishments;

The railway lamp-foreman, tall, strong, fleet of foot, with gentle voice—lover of the fields and flowers, going long walks Sundays or late evenings by moonlight—sending the balance of his earnings to support his aged father and mother;