"God will provide." Yes, it is the poor who feel themselves near to the God of love. Though he slay them, still do they trust him.
"I hope," said I to a poor apple-woman, who had been drawn on to disclose a tale of distress that, almost in the mere hearing, made me weary of life, "I hope I may yet see you in a happier condition." "With God's help," she replied, with a smile that Raphael would have delighted to transfer to his canvas; a Mozart, to strains of angelic sweetness. All her life she had seemed an outcast child; still she leaned upon a Father's love.
The dignity of a state like this may vary its form in, more or less richness and beauty of detail, but here is the focus of what makes life valuable. It is this spirit which makes poverty the best servant to the ideal of human nature. I am content with this type, and will only quote, in addition, a ballad I found in a foreign periodical, translated from Chamisso, and which forcibly recalled my own laundress as an equally admirable sample of the same class, the Ideal Poor, which we need for our consolation, so long as there must be real poverty.
"THE OLD WASHERWOMAN.
"Among yon lines her hands have laden,
A laundress with white hair appears,
Alert as many a youthful maiden,
Spite of her five-and-seventy years;
Bravely she won those white hairs, still
Eating the bread hard toll obtained her,
And laboring truly to fulfil
The duties to which God ordained her.
"Once she was young and full of gladness,
She loved and hoped,—was wooed and won;
Then came the matron's cares,—the sadness
No loving heart on earth may shun.
Three babes she bore her mate; she prayed
Beside his sick-bed,—he was taken;
She saw him in the church-yard laid,
Yet kept her faith and hope unshaken.
"The task her little ones of feeding
She met unfaltering from that hour;
She taught them thrift and honest breeding,
Her virtues were their worldly dower.
To seek employment, one by one,
Forth with her blessing they departed,
And she was in the world alone—
Alone and old, but still high-hearted.
"With frugal forethought; self-denying,
She gathered coin, and flax she bought,
And many a night her spindle plying,
Good store of fine-spun thread she wrought.
The thread was fashioned in the loom;
She brought it home, and calmly seated
To work, with not a thought of gloom,
Her decent grave-clothes she completed.
"She looks on them with fond elation;
They are her wealth, her treasure rare,
Her age's pride and consolation,
Hoarded with all a miser's care.
She dons the sark each Sabbath day,
To hear the Word that falleth never!
Well-pleased she lays it then away
Till she shall sleep in it forever!
"Would that my spirit witness bore me.
That, like this woman, I had done
The work my Master put before me
Duly from morn till set of sun!
Would that life's cup had been by me
Quaffed in such wise and happy measure,
And that I too might finally
Look on my shroud with such meek pleasure!"
Such are the noble of the earth. They do not repine, they do not chafe, even in the inmost heart. They feel that, whatever else may be denied or withdrawn, there remains the better part, which cannot be taken from them. This line exactly expresses the woman I knew:—
"Alone and old, but still high-hearted."
Will any, poor or rich, fail to feel that the children of such a parent were rich when
"Her virtues were their worldly dower"?
Will any fail to bow the heart in assent to the aspiration,