ly beams over,
the squalid walls, foul with green damps, and the miserable yet clean
bed, and the fireless hearth, and the empty board, and the pale cheek
of the wife, as she rose and flung her arms round his neck, and murmured
out her joy and welcome. "There," said he, as he extricated himself from
her, and flung the money upon the table, "there, love, pine no more,
feed yourself and our daughter, and then let us sleep and be happy in
our dreams."

A writer, one of the most gifted of the present day, has told the
narrator of this history that no interest of a high nature can be given
to extreme poverty. I know not if this be true yet if I mistake not our
human feelings, there is nothing so exalted, or so divine, as a great
and brave spirit working out its end through every earthly obstacle
and evil; watching through the utter darkness, and steadily defying the
phantoms which crowd around it; wrestling with the mighty allurements,
and rejecting the fearful voice of that WANT which is the deadliest
and surest of human tempters; nursing through all calamity the love
of species, and the warmer and closer affections of private ties;
sacrificing no duty, resisting all sin; and amidst every horror and
every humiliation, feeding the still and bright light of that genius
which, like the lamp of the fabulist, though it may waste itself for
years amidst the depths of solitude, and the silence of the tomb, shall
live and burn immortal and undimmed, when all around it is rottenness
and decay!

And yet I confess that it is a painful and bitter task to record the
humiliations, the wearing, petty, stinging humiliations, of Poverty; to
count the drops as they slowly fall, one by one, upon the fretted and
indignant heart; to particularize, with the scrupulous and nice hand of
indifference, the fractional and divided movements in the dial-plate of
Misery; to behold the refinement of birth, the masculine pride of blood,
the dignities of intellect, the wealth of knowledge, the delicacy, and
graces of womanhood,--all that ennoble and soften the stony mass of
commonplaces which is our life frittered into atoms, trampled into the
dust and mire of the meanest thoroughfares of distress; life and soul,
the energies and aims of man, ground into one prostrating want, cramped
into one levelling sympathy with the dregs and refuse of his kind,
blistered into a single galling and festering sore: this is, I own, a
painful and a bitter task; but it ha