e artisan, the
foreboding sighs of the mother, the ghastly dreams which haunt the
avaricious, the conscious debasement of the subservient, the humiliation
of the proud? These are severe sufferings; are they authorised by the
nature of poverty? Certainly not, if poverty induced no adventitious
evils, involved nothing but a deficiency of the comforts of life,
leaving life itself unimpaired. "The life is more than food, and the
body than raiment;" and the untimely extinction of the life itself would
not be worth the pangs which apprehended poverty excites. But poverty
involves woes which, in their sum, are far greater than itself. To a
multitude it is the loss of a pursuit which they have yet to learn will
be certainly supplied. For such, alleviation or compensation is in
store, in the rising up of objects new, and the creation of fresh hopes.
The impoverished merchant, who may no longer look out for his argosies,
may yet be in glee when he finds it "a rare dropping morning for the
early colewort." To another multitude, poverty involves loss of rank,--
a letting down among strangers whose manners are ungenial, and their
thoughts unfamiliar. For these there may be solace in retirement, or
the evil may fall short of its threats. The reduced gentlewoman may
live in patient solitude, or may grow into sympathy with her neighbours,
by raising some of them up to herself, and by warming her heart at the
great central fire of Humanity, which burns on under the crust of
manners as rough as the storms of the tropics, or as frigid as polar
snows. The avaricious are out of the pale of peace already, and at all
events. Poverty is most seriously an evil to sons and daughters, who
see their parents stripped of comfort, at an age when comfort is almost
one with life itself: and to parents who watch the narrowing of the
capacities of their children by the pressure of poverty,--the impairing
of their promise, the blotting out of their prospects. To such mourning
children there is little comfort, but in contemplating the easier life
which lies behind, and (it may be hoped) the happier one which stretches
before their parents, on the other side the postern of life. If there
is sunshine on the two grand reaches of their path, the shadow which
lies in the midst is necessarily but a temporary gloom. To grieving
parents it should be a consoling truth, that as the life is more than
food, so is the soul more than instruction and opportun