Behold the lilies of the field, They toil not neither do they spin; (So doth the ancient text begin,-- Not of such rest as one of these Can share.) Another rest and ease Along each summer-sated path From its new lord the garden hath, Than that whose spring in blessings ran Which praised the bounteous husbandman, Ere yet, in days of hankering breath, The lilies sickened unto death. It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united to an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of man’s sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets, yet young, delicate, “apparelled beyond parallel,” unblessed, with a beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci’s hand, might stand whole ages long “for preachings of what God can do,” and then to endow such a one with the sensitiveness of a poet’s own mind, make her read afresh as though by lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days-- Much older than any history That is written in any book, and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which man’s transgressions will be visited--this is, indeed, to hazard all things in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward. Shall no man hold his pride forewarn’d Till in the end, the Day of Days, At Judgment, one of his own race, As frail and lost as you, shall rise,-- His daughter with his mother’s eyes!