ke them, so
long near moss. The face has only now and then, for a resting-while,
their privilege.

If our feet are now so severed from the natural ground, they have
inevitably lost life and strength by the separation. It is only the
entirely unshod that have lively feet. Watch a peasant who never wears
shoes, except for a few unkind hours once a week, and you may see the
play of his talk in his mobile feet; they become as dramatic as his
hands. Fresh as the air, brown with the light, and healthy from the
field, not used to darkness, not grown in prison, the foot of the
_contadino_ is not abashed. It is the foot of high life that is prim,
and never lifts a heel against its dull conditions, for it has forgotten
liberty. It is more active now than it lately was--certainly the foot of
woman is more active; but whether on the pedal or in the stirrup, or clad
for a walk, or armed for a game, or decked for the waltz, it is in bonds.
It is, at any rate, inarticulate.

It has no longer a distinct and divided life, or none that is visible and
sensible. Whereas the whole living body has naturally such infinite
distinctness that the sense of touch differs, as it were, with every
nerve, and the fingers are so separate that it was believed of them of
old that each one had its angel, yet the modern foot is, as much as
possible, deprived of all that delicate distinction: undone,
unspecialized, sent back to lower forms of indiscriminate life. It is as
though a landscape with separate sweetness in every tree should be rudely
painted with the blank--blank, not simple--generalities of a vulgar hand.
Or as though one should take the pleasures of a day of happiness in a
wholesale fashion, not "turning the hours to moments," which joy can do
to the full as perfectly as pain.

The foot, with its articulations, is suppressed, and its language
confused. When Lovelace likens the hand of Amarantha to a violin, and
her glove to the case, he has at any rate a glove to deal with, not a
boot. Yet Amarantha's foot is as lovely as her hand. It, too, has a
"tender inward"; no wayfaring would ever make it look anything but
delicate; its arch seems too slight to carry her through a night of
dances; it does, in fact, but balance her. It is fit to cling to the
ground, but rather for springing than for rest.

And, doubtless, for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular,
sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little