path that I am treading leads to a less lively spot, to that large
heavy building on one side of the common, whose solid wings, jutting
out far beyond the main body, occupy three sides of a square, and give a
cold, shadowy look to the court. On one side is a gloomy garden, with
an old man digging in it, laid out in straight dark beds of vegetables,
potatoes, cabbages, onions, beans; all earthy and mouldy as a newly-dug
grave. Not a flower or flowering shrub! Not a rose-tree or currant-bush!
Nothing but for sober, melancholy use. Oh, different from the long
irregular slips of the cottage-gardens, with their gay bunches of
polyanthuses and crocuses, their wallflowers sending sweet odours
through the narrow casement, and their gooseberry-trees bursting into a
brilliancy of leaf, whose vivid greenness has the effect of a blossom on
the eye! Oh, how different! On the other side of this gloomy abode is a
meadow of that deep, intense emerald hue, which denotes the presence of
stagnant water, surrounded by willows at regular distances, and like the
garden, separated from the common by a wide, moat-like ditch. That is
the parish workhouse. All about it is solid, substantial, useful;--but
so dreary! so cold! so dark! There are children in the court, and yet
all is silent. I always hurry past that place as if it were a prison.
Restraint, sickness, age, extreme poverty, misery, which I have no power
to remove or alleviate,--these are the ideas, the feelings, which the
sight of those walls excites; yet, perhaps, if not certainly, they
contain less of that extreme desolation than the morbid fancy is apt to
paint. There will be found order, cleanliness, food, clothing, warmth,
refuge for the homeless, medicine and attendance for the sick, rest
and sufficiency for old age, and sympathy, the true and active sympathy
which the poor show to the poor, for the unhappy. There may be worse
places than a parish workhouse--and yet I hurry past it. The feeling,
the prejudice, will not be controlled.

The end of the dreary garden edges off into a close-sheltered lane,
wandering and winding, like a rivulet, in gentle 'sinuosities' (to use
a word once applied by Mr. Wilberforce to the Thames at Henley), amidst
green meadows, all alive with cattle, sheep, and beautiful lambs, in the
very spring and pride of their tottering prettiness; or fields of arable
land, more lively still with troops of stooping bean-setters, women
and children, in all varieti