“Flushie is my friend, my companion, and loves me better than he loves the sunshine without,” she cried.
At last the thief was found, and he gave up the dog for some money, saying, “You had better give your dog something to eat, for he has tasted nothing for three days!”
But Flush was too happy to eat; he shrank away from the plate of food which was given him, and laid down his head on his mistress’s shoulder.
“He is worth loving, is he not?” asked Elizabeth Barrett, when she had told this story to a friend.
One of her best-known poems is “The Cry of the Children.” For the little overworked children in the large factories her human heart was stirred. She knew what a life they led from early morning till late at night, amid the rushing of the great iron wheels, or working underground in the damp and dark, and she could not be silent.
“Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing towards the west—
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.”
They seem to look up with their “pale and sunken faces,” and to cry that the world is very dreary; they take but a few steps, and get so tired, that they long for rest. It is true, they say, sometimes they die very young. There was one—little Alice—died lately; they go and listen by her grave and she never cries; no one calls her up early, saying, “Get up, little Alice; it is day!” time to go off to the droning, droning wheels in the factories, and—“It is good when it happens,” say the children, “that we die before our time.” It is no good to call them to the fields to play, to gather big bunches of cowslips, to sing out, as the little thrushes do:—
“For oh!” say the children, “we are weary,
And we cannot run and leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.”
For the great wheels never stop; the little heads may burn, the little hearts may ache, till the children long to moan out:—
“O ye wheels—stop—be silent for to-day!”