I felt it all along. Weaker and weaker,
day by day, with bleeding lungs and failing limbs, I have travelled the
ocean paths. The iron has entered too deeply into my soul....
Hark! Merry voices on deck are welcoming their future home. Laugh on,
happy ones!--come out of Egypt and the house of bondage, and the waste and
howling wilderness of slavery and competition, workhouses and prisons, into
a good land and large, a land flowing with milk and honey, where you will
sit every one under his own vine and his own fig-tree, and look into the
faces of your rosy children--and see in them a blessing and not a curse!
Oh, England! stern mother-land, when wilt thou renew thy youth?--Thou
wilderness of man's making, not God's!... Is it not written, that the
days shall come when the forest shall break forth into singing, and the
wilderness shall blossom like the rose?
Hark! again, sweet and clear, across the still night sea, ring out the
notes of Crossthwaite's bugle--the first luxury, poor fellow, he ever
allowed himself; and yet not a selfish one, for music, like mercy, is twice
blessed--
"It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
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