A WORD TO THE READER. vii mto silence and into shade; he leaves you alone with the creations he has called to life, the representatives of his emotions and his thoughts, the intermediators between the individual and the crowd; children, not of the clay, but of the spirit; may they be faithful to their origin! so should they be monitors, not loud but deep, of the world into which they are cast, struggling against the obstacles that will beset them for the heritage of their parent—the right to survive the grave! London, September 12, 1837. BOOK I. Τὸ γὰρ νεάζον ἐν τοιοισδε βόσκεται SOPHOCLES-Trachin., 144. "Youth pastures in a valley of its own: The glare of noon, the rains and winds of heaven, BOOK I. CHAPTER I. "My meaning in't, I profess, was very honest in the behalf of the maid yet who would have suspected an ambush where I was taken ?"-All's Well that Ends Well, act iv., scene 3. SOME four miles distant from one of our northern manufacturing towns, in the year 18-, was a wide and desolate common; a more dreary spot it is impossible to conceive the herbage grew up in sickly patches from the midst of a black and stony soil. Not a tree was to be seen in the whole of the comfortless expanse. Nature herself had seemed to desert the solitude, as if scared by the ceaseless din of the neighbouring forges; and even art, which presses all things into service, had disdained to cull use or beauty from the unpromising demesnes. There was something weird and primeval in the aspect of the place. Especially when, in the long nights of winter, you beheld the distant fires and lights, which give to the vicinity of certain manufactories so preternatural an appearance, streaming red and wild over the waste. So abandoned by man appeared the spot, that you found it difficult to imagine that it was only from human fires that its bleak and barren desolation was illumined. For miles along the moor you detected no vestige of any habitation; but as you approached the verge nearest to the town, you could just perceive, at a little distance from the main road, by which the common was intersected, a small, solitary, and miserable hovel. Within this lone abode, at the time in which my story opens, were seated two persons. The one was a man of about fifty years of age, and in a squalid and wretched garb, which was yet relieved by an affectation of ill-sorted finery: a silk handkerchief, which boasted the ornament of a large broach of false stones, was twisted jantily round a muscular but meager throat. |