Yes! there are real mourners. I have seen
A fair, sad girl, mild, suffering, and serene;
Attention through the day her duties claimed,
And to be useful as resigned she aimed.
Neatly she dressed, nor vainly seemed to expect
Pity for grief, or pardon for neglect;
But when her wearied parents sank to sleep,
She sought her place to meditate and weep.
******
She placed a decent stone his grave above,
Neatly engraved—an offering of her love:
For that she wrought, for that forsook her bed,
Awake alike to duty and the dead.
******
Here will she come, and on the grave will sit,
Folding her arms in long abstracted fit;
But if observer pass will take her round,
And careless seem, for she would not be found.
“Where is now the free and uninterrupted admission for such mourners? Grief is a retiring creature, who ‘would not be found,’ and will not knock at the door of the constituted authorities for the keys: she will look lingeringly at the impassable barriers and retire. Easy of access were churchyards until lately, with their pleasant footpaths, lying, with the tranquillity of moonlight, in the bosom of towns and villages; old, simple, and venerable,—trodden, it may be, too frequently by unthinking feet—but able at all times to impress a feeling of sacredness—fraught as they were with the solemnities of life and death—on bosoms not over religious; and now, to a fanciful view, they seem more the prisons than the resting-places of the dead.”
CHAPTER XVII.
EDUCATION OF THE RURAL POPULATION.
We have said that we will look at what education and other causes are doing, and what they are leaving undone in the change of character which they are effecting in the rural population. It appears by the Reports of the Poor-Law and Charity Commissioners that education progresses more in the northern and manufacturing districts than in the southern and agricultural ones. This is, no doubt, very much the case; and what education is leaving undone in these districts is, that it acts too timidly, too much in the spirit of worldly wisdom. It is afraid of making the people too intellectual; of raising their tastes, lest it should spoil them as Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water. My own experience is, that this is a grand mistake; that you cannot give them too pure and lofty a standard of taste; and that especially, our best and noblest poets, as Milton, Shakspeare, Wordsworth, Cowper, Southey, Campbell, Burns, Bloomfield, etc. should be put into their hands, and particularly into those of the agricultural population. What can be so rational as to imbue the minds of those who are to spend their lives in the fields with all those associations which render the country doubly delightful? It is amazing what avidity they evince for such writers when they are once made familiar with them; and whoever has his mind well stored with the pure and noble sentiments of such writers will never condescend to debase his nature by theft, idleness, and low habits. The great alarm has always been that of lifting the poor by such knowledge above their occupations, and filling their heads with airy notions. I can only point again to the agricultural population of Scotland, where such knowledge abounds. If the labourers have not the genius of Burns, many of them have a great portion of the manly and happy feeling with which
He walked in glory and in joy,
Following his plough along the mountain side.