eelin' and a dewin' of it all, how'd yer feel? Wi' six
children, mebbe, biggest ony seven or eight, a crazin' ye for bread. And
ye mayn't send 'em out, cos o' labour-laws, to pick up a halfpenny for
theerselves; and tha passon be all agin yer, cos ye warn't thrifty and
didn't gev a penny for the forrin blacks out o' the six shillin' a week?
Would yer think iron beast wor o' use thin? or would yer damn him hard?"

* * *

The poetic faculty--as you call the insight and the sympathy which feels
a divinity in all created things and a joy unutterable in the natural
beauty of the earth--is lacking in the generality of women,
notwithstanding their claims to the monopoly of emotion. If it be not,
how comes it that women have given you no great poet since the days of
Sappho?

It is women's deficiency in intellect, you will observe. Not a whit: it
is women's deficiency in sympathy.

The greatness of a poet lies in the universality of his sympathies. And
women are not sympathetic, because they are intensely self-centred.

* * *

All living things seemed to draw closer together in the perils and
privations of the winter, as you men do in the frost of your frights or
your sorrows. In summer--as in prosperity--every one is for himself, and
is heedless of others because he needs nothing of them.

* * *

It was covered, from the lowest of its stones to the top of its peaked
roof, with a gigantic rose-thorn.

"Sure the noblest shrub as ever God have made," would Ben say, looking
at its massive, cactus-like branches, with their red, waxen,
tender-coloured berries. The cottage was very old, and the rose-thorn
was the growth of centuries. Men's hands had never touched it. It had
stretched where it would, ungoverned, unhampered, unarrested. It had a
beautiful dusky glow about it always, from its peculiar thickness and
its blended hues; and in the chilly weather the little robin red-breasts
would come and flutter into it, and screen themselves in its shelter
from the cold, and make it rosier yet with the brightness of their
little ruddy throats.

"Tha Christ-birds do allus seem safest like i' tha Christ-bush," Ben
would say softly, breaking off the larger half of his portion of oaten
cake, to crumble for the robins with the dawn. I never knew what he
meant, though I saw he had some soft, grave, old-world story in his
thoughts, that made the rose-thorn and the red-breasts bo