They seemed to my boyish fancy
mysterious messengers from another world: the silent, lonely night, in
which they were the only moving things, added to the wonder. I used to get
out of bed to gaze at them, and envy the coarse men and sluttish women who
attended them, their labour among verdant plants and rich brown mould, on
breezy slopes, under God's own clear sky. I fancied that they learnt what
I knew I should have learnt there; I knew not then that "the eye only sees
that which it brings with it the power of seeing." When will their eyes be
opened? When will priests go forth into the highways and the hedges, and
preach to the ploughman and the gipsy the blessed news, that there too, in
every thicket and fallow-field, is the house of God,--there, too, the gate
of Heaven?
I do not complain that I am a Cockney. That, too, is God's gift. He
made me one, that I might learn to feel for poor wretches who sit
stifled in reeking garrets and workrooms, drinking in disease with every
breath,--bound in their prison-house of brick and iron, with their own
funeral pall hanging over them, in that canopy of fog and poisonous smoke,
from their cradle to their grave.
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