e Doctor. 'I think
of it more and more as the years go on, and with more and more gratitude
towards the Power that dispenses such afflictions. Your health, my
darling, my studious quiet, our little kitchen delicacies, how they
would all have suffered, how they would all have been sacrificed! And
for what? Children are the last word of human imperfection. Health flees
before their face. They cry, my dear; they put vexatious questions;
they demand to be fed, to be washed, to be educated, to have their noses
blowed; and then, when the time comes, they break our hearts, as I
break this piece of sugar. A pair of professed egoists, like you and me,
should avoid offspring, like an infidelity.'

'Indeed!' said she; and she laughed. 'Now, that is like you--to take
credit for the thing you could not help.'

*****

I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound
for ever on man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast
it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful
pressure.

*****

Forth from the casement, on the plain
Where honour has the world to gain,
Pour forth and bravely do your part,
O knights of the unshielded heart!
'Forth and for ever forward!--out
From prudent turret and redoubt,
And in the mellay charge amain,
To fall, but yet to rise again!
Captive? Ah, still, to honour bright,
A captive soldier of the right!
Or free and fighting, good with ill?
Unconquering but unconquered still!

O to be up and doing, O
Unfearing and unshamed to go
In all the uproar and the press
About my human business!
My undissuaded heart I hear
Whisper courage in my ear.
With voiceless calls, the ancient earth
Summons me to a daily birth.

*****

Yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born. They
can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own paymasters on
parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no more. For I suppose
that in the course of ages, and through reform and civil war and
invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and more general design than
to set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century beyond the reach
of needs and duties. Society was scarce put together, and defended
with so much eloquence and blood, for the convenience of two or three
millionaires and a few hundred other persons of wealth and position.
It is plain that