Perhaps the English peasant, the
English operative, is less susceptible to such influences than the Scotch
or the Irish; but over him, sordid as his conditions are, close kin as he
is to the clod, the light of poetry is diffused; there filters into his
life, also, something of that divine stream of which we have spoken, a
dialect poem that touches him, the leaf of a psalm, some bit of
imagination, some tale of pathos, set afloat by a poor writer so long ago
that it has become the common stock of human tradition-maybe from
Palestine, maybe from the Ganges, perhaps from Athens--some expression of
real emotion, some creation, we say, that makes for him a world, vague
and dimly apprehended, that is not at all the actual world in which he
sins and suffers. The poor woman, in a hut with an earth floor, a reeking
roof, a smoky chimney, barren of comfort, so indecent that a gentleman
would not stable his horse in it, sits and sews upon a coarse garment,
while she rocks the cradle of an infant about whom she cherishes no
illusions that his lot will be other than that of his father before him.
As she sits forlorn, it is not the wretched hovel that she sees, nor
other hovels like it--rows of tenements of hopeless poverty, the
ale-house, the gin-shop, the coal-pit, and the choking factory--but:
"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green"
for her, thanks to the poet.
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