Page:Ethel Churchill 1.pdf/313

is the same overpowering misery: the poor man has all the higher faculties of his being absorbed in a perpetual struggle with cold and hunger: a step higher, and pretence comes to aggravate poverty; dig we cannot, and to beg we are ashamed. Go on into what are called the higher classes, and there we find ambition the fever of the soul, and jealousy its canker. There are pleasures; but there is no relish for them: and luxuries which have become wearisome as wants. The feelings are either dull in selfish apathy, that excludes enjoyment; or unduly keen, till a look or word is torture. Then your philosophers, your poets, your men of science—what do they do but spend breathing and healthful life on wasting pursuits, in which the very success only shows how worthless it is to succeed? The mind feeds upon the body: pale sickness, and early decrepitude, overmaster even its spiritual essence. Too late it discovers that this earth is its prison, and not its home: the heart beats, and its pulses are the clockwork of wretchedness: the head examines only to find that all