X

I have been talking to-day about children; and find that most of the while I have been thinking, if but subconsciously, of poor children. Now, at the end, you may ask 'Why, lecturing here at Cambridge, is he preoccupied with poor children who leave school at fourteen and under, and thereafter read no poetry?'…Oh, yes! I know all about these children and the hopeless, wicked waste; these with a common living-room to read in, a father tired after his day's work, and (for parental encouragement) just the two words 'Get out!' A Scots domine writes in his log:

I have discovered a girl with a sense of humour. I asked my qualifying class to draw a graph of the attendance at a village kirk. 'And you must explain away any rise or fall,' I said.

Margaret Steel had a huge drop one Sunday, and her explanation was 'Special Collection for Missions.' Next Sunday the Congregation was abnormally large: Margaret wrote 'Change of Minister.'… Poor Margaret! When she is fourteen, she will go out into the fields, and in three years she will be an ignorant country bumpkin.

And again:

Robert Campbell (a favourite pupil) left the school to-day. He had reached the age-limit…. Truly it is like death: I stand by a new made grave, and I have no hope of a resurrection. Robert is dead.

Precisely because I have lived on close terms with this, and the wicked waste of it, I appeal to you who are so much more fortunate than this Robert or this Margaret and will have far more to say in the world, to think of them—how many they are. I am not sentimentalising. When an Elementary Schoolmaster spreads himself and tells me he looks upon every child entering his school as a potential Lord Chancellor, I answer that, as I expect, so I should hope, to die before seeing the world a Woolsack. Jack cannot ordinarily be as good as his master; if he were, he would be a great deal better. You have given Robert a vote, however, and soon you will have to give it to Margaret. Can you not give them also, in their short years at school, something to sustain their souls in the long Valley of Humiliation?

Do you remember this passage in "The Pilgrim's Progress"—as the pilgrims passed down that valley?

  Now as they were going along and talking, they espied a
  Boy feeding his Father's Sheep. The Boy was in very mean
  Cloaths, but of a very fresh and well-favoured
  Countenance, and as he sate by himself he Sung. Hark, said
  Mr Greatheart, to what the Shepherd's Boy saith.

Well, it was a very pretty song, about Contentment.

     He that is down need fear no fall
     He that is low, no Pride:
     He that is humble ever shall
     Have God to be his Guide.

But I care less for its subject than for the song. Though life condemn him to live it through in the Valley of Humiliation, I want to hear the Shepherd Boy singing.

[Footnote 1: The reference given is Zeitschr. f. Ethnologie,
XIX. 30 ff.]