ready hand unlocks the doors of
dreary cellars or towering and chilly edifices; mind hath not yet
promulgated or received the noble doctrine that toil is dignity; and you,
yes, even you, dear, gentle hearts! would feel the artizan a slave, if
some clever limner showed you the toiling wretch sooted or japanned. Would
you then rob him of one means of happiness? No--not even of his pipe!
Ladies, you tread on carpets or on marble floors--I will tell you where my
foot has been. I have walked where the air was circumscribed--where man
was manacled by space, for no other crimes but those of poverty and
misfortune. I've seen the broken merchant seated round a hearth that had
not one endearment--they looked about for faces that were wont to smile
upon them, and they saw but mirrors of their own sad lineaments--some
laughed in mockery of their sorrows, as though they thought that mirth
would come for asking; others, grown brutal by being caged, made up in
noise what they lacked in peace. How comfortless they seemed! The only
solace that the eye could trace was the odious herb, tobacco!

I have climbed the dark and narrow stairway that led to a modern Helicon;
there I have seen the gentle creature that loved nature for her
beauty--beauty that was to him apparent, although he sat hemmed in by bare
and tattered walls; yet there he had seen bright fountains sparkle and the
earth robe herself with life, and where the cunning spider spread her
filmy toils above his head, he has seen a world of light, a galaxy of
wonders. The din of wheels and the harsh discordant cries of busy life
have died within his ear, and the tiny voices of choral birds have hymned
him into peace; or the lettered eloquence of dread sages has become sound
again, and he has communed in the grove and temple, as they of older time
did in the eternal cities, with those whose names are immortal--and there
I have seen the humble pipe! the sole evidence of luxury or enjoyment;
when his daily task was suspended, it can never end, for he must weave and
weave the fibres of his brain into the clue that leads him to the means of
sustaining life.

I have wandered through lanes and fields when the autumn was on and the
world golden, and my journey has ended at a yeoman's door. My welcome has
been a hand-grasp, that needed bones and muscles to bear it
unflinchingly--my fare the homeliest, but the sweetest; and when the meal
was ended, how has the night wore on and then away ove