The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860

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Various. The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860

THE UNITED STATES AND THE BARBARY STATES

SUNSHINE

THE TWO TONGUES

MIDSUMMER AND MAY

EPITHALAMIA

ARTHUR HALLAM

THE CONFESSIONS OF A MEDIUM

JOHN ANDRE AND HONORA SNEYD

WE SHALL RISE AGAIN

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY. CHAPTER XXIII. THE WILD HUNTSMAN

CHAPTER XXIV. ON HIS TRACKS

A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

Отрывок из книги

I have always worked in the carpet-factories. My father and mother worked there before me and my sisters, as long as they lived. My sisters died first;–the one, I think, out of deep sorrow; the other from too much joy.

My older sister worked hard, knew nothing else but work, never thought of anything else, nor found any joy in work, scarcely in the earnings that came from it. Perhaps she pined for want of more air, shut up in the rooms all day, not caring to find it in walking or in the fields, or even in books. Household-work awaited her daily after the factory-work, and a dark, strange religion oppressed and did not sustain her, Sundays. So we scarcely wondered when she died. It seemed, indeed, as if she had died long ago,–as if the life had silently passed away from her, leaving behind a working body that was glad at last to find a rest it had never known before.

.....

"You forget," I said, "if I could put the real sunlight into such a picture, it would no longer be mine; I should be a borrower, not a creator of light; I should be no more of an artist than I am now."

"You will always refuse to acknowledge it," she said; "but you can never persuade me that you have not the power to create a sunbeam. An imprisoned sunbeam! The idea is absurd."

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