All their life long man denies them
the one right in the soil which yet is so much theirs, that once
that life is over, he can no longer deny it--the right of room to
lie down. Space itself is not allowed to be theirs by any right of
existence: the voice of the night-guardian commanding them to move
on, is as the howling of a death-hound hunting them out of the air
into their graves.
In St. James's we came upon a group around the gates of a great
house. Visitors were coming and going, and it was a show to be had
for nothing by those who had nothing to pay. Oh! the children with
clothes too ragged to hold pockets for their chilled hands, that
stared at the childless duchess descending from her lordly carriage!
Oh! the wan faces, once lovely as theirs, it may be, that gazed
meagre and pinched and hungry on the young maidens in rose-colour
and blue, tripping lightly through the avenue of their eager
eyes--not yet too envious of unattainable felicity to gaze with
admiring sympathy on those who seemed to them the angels, the
goddesses of their kind. 'O God!' I thought, but dared not speak,
'and thou couldst make all these girls so lovely! Thou couldst give
them all the gracious garments of rose and blue and white if thou
wouldst! Why should these not be like those? They are hungry even,
and wan and torn. These too are thy children. There is wealth
enough in thy mines and in thy green fields, room enough in thy
starry spaces, O God!' But a voice--the echo of Falconer's
teaching, awoke in my heart--'Because I would have these more
blessed than those, and those more blessed with them, for they are
all my children.
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