But thy poor slaves the alteration see,
With many a loss to them the truth is known.
••••••
And every village owns its tyrants now,
And parish slaves must live as parish kings allow."
With the intensest love of home, with a capacity for the fullest, deepest human affection, he is driven at last by utter stress of woe to feel completely weaned from it, and to cry, as many an aged labourer, the inmate of a Union so distant that he is forgotten by kith and kin, might do, that
"Even those he loved best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest."
And then his errors : are they not just those of the labouring man? And so too the deep yet melancholy piety which marks him all through life—so in harmony with what one reads everywhere in our village churchyards.
Life is a misery—an ignis fatuus,—death a freedom from misery—something that will heal every wound, and enable him to lay his aching head to rest. He is resigned; "God's will be done," he says.
"Fate's decree,
Doomed many evils should encompass thee."
He speaks of God as "the Omnipotent," thinking doubtless of Him as the poor labourer does in His awful character as "the Almighty." His simple theology is this:—God has mysteriously doomed us to pain and want here; if we bear it patiently and well now, we shall be rewarded hereafter. Thus, speaking of the dead who lie in the churchyard, he says—
"The bill's made out, the reck'ning paid.
The book is crossed, the business done;
On them the last demand is made,
And heaven's eternal peace is won."
Who will deny that there is some truth in this view with our Lord's words before him? "But Abraham said. Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things ; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented." But at best it is a view which can only help men to
