There was no day that we
did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something
about it.
Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad
hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness
and grandeur. Earth is always beautiful - always. Without colour, or leaf,
or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without
anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer - the power is
ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever
there, and - will - satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the
barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively
longs for the beautiful; the means we possess to gratify it are
limited - we are always trying to find the statue in the rude block. Out
of the vast block of the earth the mind endeavours to carve itself
loveliness, nobility, and grandeur. We strive for the right and the true:
it is circumstance that thrusts wrong upon us.
One morning a labouring man came to the door with a spade, and asked if
he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk of breaking the tool in
the ground. He was starving; he had had no work for two months; it was
just six months, he said, since the first frost started the winter.
Nature and the earth and the gods did not trouble about - him - , you see;
he might grub the rock-frost ground with his hands if he chose - the
yellowish black sky did not care. Nothing for man! The only good he found
was in his fellow-men; they fed him after a fashion - still they fed him.
There was no good in anything else. Another aged man came once a week
regularly; white as the snow through which he walked. In summer he
worked; since the winter began he had had no employment, but supported
himself by going round to the farms in rotation. They all gave him a
trifle - bread and cheese, a penny, a slice of meat - something; and so he
lived, and slept the whole of that time in outhouses wherever he could.
He had no home of any kind. Why did he not go into the workhouse? 'I be
afeared if I goes in there they'll put me with the rough uns, and very
likely I should get some of my clothes stole.' Rather than go into the
workhouse he would totter round in the face of the blasts that might
cover his weak old limbs with drift. There was a sense of dignity and
manhood left still; his clothes were worn, but clean and decent; he was
no companion of rogues; the snow and frost, the straw of the outhouses,
was better than that. He was struggling against age, against nature,
against circumstance; the entire weight of society, law, and order
pressed upon him to force him to lose his self-respect and liberty.
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