[From Dickens's Household Words.]
HIRAM POWERS'S GREEK SLAVE.
THEY say Ideal Beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
This alien Image with the shackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave: as if the artist meant her,
(The passionless perfection which he lent her,
Shadowed, not darkened, where the sill expands,)
To, so, confront man's crimes in different lands,
With man's ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,
Art's fiery finger! and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone,
From God's pure heights of beauty, against man's wrong!
Catch up, in thy divine face, not alone
East griefs, but west, and strike and shame the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown.
[From Papers for the People.]
THE BLACK POCKET-BOOK.
"WHAT do you pay for peeping?" said a baker's boy with a tray on his shoulder to a young man in a drab-colored greatcoat, and with a cockade in his hat, who, on a cold December's night was standing with his face close to the parlor window of a mean house, in a suburb of one of our largest seaport towns in the south of England.
Tracy Walkingham, which was the name of the peeper, might have answered that he paid dear enough; for in proportion as he indulged himself with these surreptitious glances, he found his heart stealing away from him, till he literally had not a corner of it left that he could fairly call his own.
Tracy was a soldier; but being in the service of one of his officers, named D'Arcy, was relieved from wearing his uniform. At sixteen years of age he had run away from a harsh schoolmaster, and enlisted in an infantry regiment; and about three weeks previous to the period at which our story opens, being sent on an early errand to his master's laundress, his attention had been arrested by a young girl, who, coming hastily out of an apothecary's shop with a phial in her hand, was rushing across the street, unmindful of the London coach and its four horses, which were close upon her, and by which she would assuredly have been knocked down, had not Tracy seized her by the arm and snatched her from the danger.
"You'll be killed if you don't look sharper," said he carelessly; but as he spoke, she turned her face toward him. "I hope my roughness has not hurt you?" he continued in a very different tone: "I'm afraid I gripped your arm too hard?"