Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography by Charles Kingsley (best short novels txt) 📗

to soothe my dying ears! Ah! how should there not be A Good Time Coming?—Hope, and trust, and infinite deliverance!—a time such as eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive!—coming surely, soon or late, to those for whom a God did not disdain to die!

* * * * *

Our only remaining duty is to give an extract from a letter written by John
Crossthwaite, and dated

"GALVESTON, TEXAS, October, 1848.

… "I am happy. Katie is happy, There is peace among us here, like 'the clear downshining after rain.' But I thirst and long already for the expiration of my seven years' exile, wholesome as I believe it to be. My only wish is to return and assist in the Emancipation of Labour, and give my small aid in that fraternal union of all classes which I hear is surely, though slowly, spreading in my mother-land.

"And now for my poor friend, whose papers, according to my promise to him, I transmit to you. On the very night on which he seems to have concluded them—an hour after we had made the land—we found him in his cabin, dead, his head resting on the table as peacefully as if he had slumbered. On a sheet of paper by him were written the following verses; the ink was not yet dry:

"'MY LAST WORDS. "'I.

"'Weep, weep, weep, and weep,
  For pauper, dolt, and slave;
  Hark! from wasted moor and fen,
  Feverous alley, workhouse den,
  Swells the wail of Englishmen:
  "Work! or the grave!"

"'II.

"'Down, down, down, and down,
  With idler, knave, and tyrant;
  Why for sluggards stint and moil
  He that will not live by toil
  Has no right on English soil;
  God's word's our warrant!

"'III.

"'Up, up, up, and up,
  Face your game, and play it!
  The night is past—behold the sun!—
  The cup is full, the web is spun,
  The Judge is set, the doom begun;
  Who shall stay it?'"

End of Project Gutenberg's Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet, by Charles Kingsley