Part 10 (1/2)

They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free.”

They seem to look up with their ”pale and sunken faces,” and to cry that the world is _very_ dreary; they take but a few steps, and get so tired, that they long for rest. It is true, they say, sometimes they die very young. There was one--little Alice--died lately; they go and listen by her grave and _she_ never cries; no one calls _her_ up early, saying, ”Get up, little Alice; it is day!” time to go off to the droning, droning wheels in the factories, and--”It is good when it happens,” say the children, ”that we die before our time.” It is no good to call them to the fields to play, to gather big bunches of cowslips, to sing out, as the little thrushes do:--

”For oh!” say the children, ”we are weary, And we cannot run and leap; If we cared for any meadows, it were merely To drop down in them and sleep.”

For the great wheels never stop; the little heads may burn, the little hearts may ache, till the children long to moan out:--

”O ye wheels--stop--be silent for to-day!”

Here were the children in their misery, life-like, only too true and real; and then the poet pleads for them, pleads that they may be taught there _is_ something in life as well as the great grinding wheels; pleads that the lives of the little factory children may be made happier and brighter.

And England heard the cry of the children. The following year fresh laws were made about the employment of children in factories; they were not to be allowed to work under the age of eight, and not then unless they were strong and healthy; they were not to work more than six hours and a half a day, and to attend school for three hours.

Three years after this poem was written Elizabeth Barrett married Robert Browning, the poet, and together they went off to Italy, where the softer air and mild climate brought back her health for a time.

”She is getting better every day,” wrote her husband; ”stronger, better wonderfully, and beyond all our hopes.”

One of Mrs. Browning's happiest poems is the story of little Ellie and the swan's nest.

”Little Ellie sits alone,” she begins, ”'mid the beeches of a meadow.”

Then she goes on to tell us of her s.h.i.+ning hair and face; how she has thrown aside her bonnet, and is dipping her feet into the shallow stream by which she sits. As she rocks herself to and fro she thinks about a swan's nest she has found among the reeds, with two precious eggs in it; then the vision of a knight, who is to be her lover, rises before her. He is to be a n.o.ble man, riding on a red-roan steed shod with silver; he is to kneel at her feet, and she will tell him to rise and go, ”put away all wrong,” so that the world may love and fear him. Off he goes; three times he is to send a little foot page to Ellie for words of comfort; the first time she will send him a white rosebud, the second time a glove, and the third time leave to come and claim her love. Then she will show him and him only the swan's nest among the reeds. Little Ellie gets up, ties on her bonnet, puts on her shoes, and goes home round by the swan's nest, as she does every day, just to see if there are any more eggs; on she goes, ”pus.h.i.+ng through the elm-tree copse, winding up the stream, light-hearted.” Then, when she reaches the place, she stops, stoops down, and what does she find? The wild swan had deserted her nest, a rat had gnawed the reeds, and ”Ellie went home sad and slow.” If she ever found the lover on the ”red-roan steed”--

”Sooth I know not: but I know She could never show him--never That swan's nest among the reeds!”

It was at Florence that Mrs. Browning's little son was born, ”her little Florentine” as she loves to call him; she has drawn us many a picture of him with his blue eyes and amber curls, lit up to golden by the Italian sun.

”My little son, my Florentine, Sit down beside my knee,”

she begins in one poem, and then she tells him in verse a tale about Florence, and the war in Italy, and when it was over the child had grown very grave. For Mrs. Browning loved Italy with all her heart, and she watched the great struggle for Italian unity, which was going on, very anxiously. From time to time she wrote patriotic poems to encourage the oppressed, and to express her delight at their victories.

At the same time England was not forgotten.

”I am listening here in Rome,” she wrote, when pleading for the ragged schools of London. Still, though under the clear Italian skies, she can see the ragged, bare-footed, hungry-eyed children begging in the London streets. It is a disgrace to England, she cries; she knows they cannot all be fed and clothed, but--

”Put a thought beneath the rags To enn.o.ble the heart's struggle,”

so that by gentle words the children may learn ”just the uses of their sorrow.” And again Mrs. Browning's appeal was not in vain.

One of her last poems was a very sad one, called ”Little Mattie.”

Mrs. Browning had, even in Italy, suffered very much from bad health, and in 1861 she died. She was buried beside a gra.s.sy wall in the English burial-ground just outside Florence, the city she loved so well, in Italy, ”my Italy” as she has called it, the land where Keats and Sh.e.l.ley lie.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (born 1820).

Of the early and private life of Florence Nightingale there is no need to speak, but you should know what good work she has done for her country, how she left her English home to go and nurse the poor soldiers who were wounded in battle in the Crimea, and how well she did the work that she undertook to do. Not only did she work out of England, but in England she has improved some of our hospitals, taught some of our English nurses how to work better, and has made nursing into the happier labour it is now, instead of the drudgery it was too often before.

She was born in Florence in 1820, and therefore named after that town, but her home was always in Derbys.h.i.+re. She was always fond of nursing, and her early ambition was to improve the system of nursing, and to get many things done that she saw would make pain and suffering more bearable in our English hospitals.

Now in Germany, in a little village[1] on the great Rhine, is a large building where women are trained as nurses for sick people. They all wear full black skirts and very white ap.r.o.ns, deep white collars and caps, and all the sick people come from the village and villages round to be nursed by them. There was no training-school for women in England, so it was to this kind of hospital home that Florence Nightingale went in 1851, and there she worked for three months. They were three happy months, and she learnt the best German rules of nursing, and saw how a large hospital ought to be managed; and so she got some of the training which fitted her for the great work which she undertook some years later. On her return to England, she became head of a London hospital for women.