Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/220

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for innumerable ages—through which they lived like the beasts with which they shared the tillage of the ground, and then died like those beasts, leaving no trace behind them of a moral and intellectual being. Day and night, summer and winter succeeded each other, but the sun of each successive day which brought so many blessings to the prosperous and the happy, brought nothing to them but fresh toil and suffering, and, it might be, the reflection that they were one step nearer to the grave in which they would be at rest, and feel cold and hunger, pain and sorrow no more. And if that inanimate dust, which once had life and a human form, were now to be endowed with the power of human speech, what tales of oppression and suffering, of agony and horror, could it not unfold? The country churchyard seems to awaken memories that carry the mind of the observer further back into the past than the urban churchyard, though the latter may show one or two names more celebrated than any that may be read on the tombstones of the former. The village Hampden and the mute inglorious Milton, if they ever lived the village life out of Gray's "Elegy," lived and died as unheard of and as unrecorded as if they had never been. There