ds for some inscrutable sorrow. It might have been a reminiscence of
actual calamity in her past life, or, quite as probably, it was but a
dramatic woe, beneath which she had staggered and shrieked and wrung her
hands with hundreds of repetitions in the sight of crowded theatres, and
been as often comforted by thunders of applause. But my idea of the
mystery was, that she had a sense of wrong in seeing the aged woman (whose
empty vivacity was like the rattling of dry peas in a bladder) chosen as
the central object of interest to the visitors, while she herself, who had
agitated thousands of hearts with a breath, sat starving for the
admiration that was her natural food. I appeal to the whole society of
artists of the Beautiful and the Imaginative,--poets, romancers, painters,
sculptors, actors,--whether or no this is a grief that may be felt even
amid the torpor of a dissolving brain!

We looked into a good many sleeping-chambers, where were rows of beds,
mostly calculated for two occupants, and provided with sheets and
pillow-cases that resembled sackcloth. It appeared to me that the sense of
beauty was insufficiently regarded in all the arrangements of the
almshouse; a little cheap luxury for the eye, at least, might do the poor
folks a substantial good. But, at all events, there was the beauty of
perfect neatness and orderliness, which, being heretofore known to few of
them, was perhaps as much as they could well digest in the remnant of
their lives. We were invited into the laundry, where a great washing and
drying were in process, the whole atmosphere being hot and vaporous with
the steam of wet garments and bedclothes. This atmosphere was the
pauper-life of the past week or fortnight resolved into a gaseous state,
and breathing it, however fastidiously, we were forced to inhale the
strange element into our inmost being. Had the Queen been there, I know
not how she could have escaped the necessity. What an intimate brotherhood
is this in which we dwell, do what we may to put an artificial remoteness
between the high creature and the low one! A poor man's breath, borne on
the vehicle of tobacco-smoke, floats into a palace-window and reaches the
nostrils of a monarch. It is but an example, obvious to the sense, of the
innumerable and secret channels by which, at every moment of our lives,
the flow and reflux of a common humanity pervade us all. How superficial
are the niceties of such as pretend to keep aloof! Let the