hilosopher goes into such retreats with his lantern,
there may he best find the generous and the brave. If, instead of the
alleys of a city, they live under the open sky, they are yet lighter
under their poverty. There, however blank the future may lie before
them, they have to-day the living reality of lawns and woods, and flocks
in "the green pasture and beside the still waters," which silently
remind them of the Shepherd, under whom they shall not want any real
good thing. The quiet of the shady lane is theirs, and the beauty of
the blossoming thorn above the pool. Delight steals through them with
the scent of the violet, or the new mown hay. If they have hushed the
voices of complaint and fear within them, there is the music of the
merry lark for them, or of the leaping waterfall, or of a whole
orchestra of harps, when the breeze sweeps through a grove of pines.
While it is not for fortune to "rob them of free nature's grace," and
while she leaves them life and strength of limb and soul, the certainty
of a future, though they cannot see what, and the assurance of
progression, though they cannot see how,--is poverty worth, for
themselves, more than a passing doubt? Can it ever be worth the torment
of fear, the bondage of subservience?--the compromise of free thought,--
the sacrifice of free speech,--the bending of the erect head, the
veiling of the open brow, the repression of the salient soul? If;
instead of this, poverty should act as the liberator of the spirit,
awakening it to trust in God and sympathy for man, and placing it aloft,
fresh and free, like morning on the hill-top, to survey the expanse of
life, and recognise its realities from beneath its mists, it should be
greeted with that holy joy before which all sorrow and sighing flee
away.

Their poverty, which had never afflicted them very grievously, was
almost lost sight of by the corner-house family, when Hester's infant
was born. They were all happy and satisfied then, though there were
people in Deerbrook who found fault with their arrangements, and were
extremely scandalised when it was found that no nurse had arrived from
Blickley, and that Morris took the charge of her mistress upon herself.
The Greys pronounced by their own fireside that it was a strange fancy--
carrying an affection for an old servant to a rather romantic extreme--
that it was a fresh instance of the "enthusiasm" which adversity had not
yet moderated in their cousins, as m