for
a perfect example of passion married to common speech, commend me to--

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part,
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
But I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart
That thus so clearly I myself can free.

Intense feeling, intense music, a lovely thing: a poem.

SKELETONS AT A FEAST

The other day the village was celebrating the birthday of its
Labourers' Union in a manner which used to be reserved for the coming
of age of the Squire's son, or for the Harvest Festival, in which the
farmer might give thanks for the harvest, and the peasant, perhaps,
for having been allowed to assist in winning it. I take a sort of
pride in recording a staidness in the observance which I believe to be
peculiar to the countryside in which I live. There was a service,
with a sermon, in church, all persuasions uniting; then a dinner with
speeches; then sports and dancing on the grass. Every stave of the
Pastoral was announced and punctuated by the village band. "God save
the King" closed all down at nine o'clock.

It was sober merry-making after our manner, yet one could feel the
undercurrent of a triumph not difficult to understand. Not a man there
but knew, or had heard his father tell, of how things used to be. Ten
years ago those men were earning sixteen shillings a week for twelve
hours a day; fifteen years ago they were earning twelve shillings;
thirty years ago they were earning nine shillings; a hundred years
ago they were on the rates, herded about in conscript gangs under the
hectorings of an overseer. Now--and it has seemed to come all in a
moment--the humblest of them earn their 36_s._ 6_d._; the head men
their 40_s._; their hours are down to fifty for the week, with a
half-holiday on Saturday; delegates of their kind sit at a board in
Trowbridge face to face and of equal worth with delegates of their
employers. All matters affecting their status, housing, terms of
employment can be brought before the board; and beside that, and
behind it, like a buttress, there is a Union, whose name recalls that
other grim fortress to which alone in times bygone they had to look
when old age was upon them. This new Union has been in existence here
little more than a twelvemonth, but they know now that it has spread
all over England.

They know more than that. They know that this plexus of organisations
is not only social, but political; they feel that the estate of the
re