hush of dawn! Such work should be done in all elementary schools.
For it is the gift of morning—the work of childhood. How free it seems, as well as lovely—and how irresponsible! But this is the freedom of children, not of men and women. One may fall in love with such freedom, but one should not be content with it too long, on pain of becoming grown-up children—that is, semi-slaves. For though Ruskin said that these craftsmen of yesterday were more than the factory hand of to-day, because they were free to do beautiful work, that is not all the truth. It is true the hand was free to project itself; but not the muscles—else the hammer of a Thor might have fallen on the master.
The serf age ended when the workman, ignorant as he was, began to project the muscular system freely. It was then that the new era began (after a long halt) in the workshops of England.
The history of that awakening is, in reality, the history of modern England. All the political struggles of the last two hundred years are a part of the travail through which the genius of the race gave birth to a new order of life, and carried self-realization through work into an entirely new field. Henceforward it reproduced life, not in forms merely,
