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Untitled Article
cannot burn amid the anti-combustible material by which it is surrounded . ¦ — How might the zeal of Dorcas have been nurtured and directed ! How might her sympathies have been warmed and expanded ! But in the eyes of her money-loving master she was a tool of toile not * thing of life and feeling : to her yet narrower mistress , whoa , moral sphere was within the poor circle of her mercenary husband ' s * Dorcas was a drudge , goaded , not guided , through the unceasing round of household occupation ; while the churlish , snappish voice , like the sound of the whip to which the negro starts , stimulated new exertions , or reproved occasional neglect . There existed in that house no idea that
1 The heart leaps kindly back to kindness , ' and that * The labour we delight in , physics pain . '
Duties which mi g ht have been disburthened of half their weight , and enlivened at the mere expense of a smile and a soft word * came , day after day , with a wearying iteration upon Dorcas . Now , too , for the first time in her life , she lived under ground . Her cottage home , lowly though it was , had no dungeon-keep for a domestic drudge : it stood upon a hill side , and the fresn winds , laden with the breath of rifled flowers , revelled in through the doors and windows .
How is the disregard of mere humanity declared in all our social arraagements ! Under-ground apartments for human habitation ought , even in the best houses , to brand a building w ^ th p . bastiie character . Why should any portion of our fejlowqreatures be doomed to breathe continually beneath the surface of
the soil ? Many a servant is worse off than the miner ; for she lives all day , and sleeps at night , in a kitchen often dark , damp , ai * d ill-ventilated ; in a place which common sense and common fueling would assign to nothing but coals and table-beer . Had crushed humanity any of the inflammability of the one , or the fermejatability of even the other , this , and many other and more
enormous arrangements , would have made it burst and blaze forth VixXh ' indignant resistance . , , In the midst of the moral desolation which surrounded Dorcas & beaip at length appeared . Letitla , the youngest child of the family , came home from school for the holidays This was a circuna ^ tance of no trifling importance to the feelings of t ) orcas : a creature who , she hoped , would speak to her , would » mile upon
fyer , was arrived . These anticipations were at iirst jn some degree realized : the child was full of news and high spirits , and acatterc $ then * somewW at random ; but It was not long ere s , ne gfw ? . tmdfgfype oi tte narrow principle vpon which her mind ifas V Wi WJW& , instead of b * mg faugnt U ) at every creature more
Untitled Article
UtB Sketch ^ of DvmeHic Life .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1835, page 398, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2646/page/34/
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