All these things combine to depress a naturally sensitive people, and to render them the victims of oppression both earthly and spiritual.
Education helps them to throw off the yoke, and every clever lad naturally thinks of emigration as the only possible cure for the terrible hardships he must endure if he stays at home. As a poor mother said, "They like to be good scholars, because it helps them to get away."
Education, too, frees their minds from still darker evils which oppress them—belief in omens, witchcraft, ghosts, etc.
"The Church an' Happy Zunday" would doubtless be very popular if it were written in ordinary English. It teaches the labouring man that—
"The best vor body an' vor soul
'S the church an' happy Zunday.
Vor then our loosened souls do rise
Wi' holy thoughts beyond the skies,
As we do think o' Him that shed
His blood vor us, an' still do spread
His love upon the live an' dead;
An' how He gi'ed a time an' pleäce
To gather us, and gi'e us greäce—
The church an' happy Zunday."
Sunday gives the poor toiler an opportunity of cultivating those human affections without which life would become bestial. It is—
"The day that's all his own to spend
Wi' God an' wi' a buzzom friend;"
the only day when families and friends can meet. Thus one of the poems describes a truly rural custom, that of bringing one another home on Sunday evening:—
"Zoo if you'd stir my heart-blood now,
Tell how we used to play, an' how
You brought us gwain on Zundays."
The Dorset peasant's faith in God is simple and childlike—God has promised, and He will perform. So, too, he forgets not the dead, but, with faith in a future life, he says—
