Lucia True Ames Mead

“ Now, to these tired, lonely women, to the young girls who as soon as they are well into their teens begin to think of marrying and abandoning all study, to the young men so eager to make money that self-culture is counted an unnecessary luxury, to the boys who spend their evenings listening to the vulgar talk of the teamsters at the corner grocery, to the ministers and teachers who find that their scant salaries permit of none of the new books and papers which are essential to their mental life,—to all these people I should like to give the blessing of books. ”

“ Suffice to say that when we first hear of London it was a little hamlet on a hill of perhaps one hundred feet in height, lying between two ranges of higher hills. At the north rose what we now call Highgate and Hampstead, about 450 feet high, and to the south, beyond the marshes and the Thames and a broad shallow lagoon, whose little islands once marked the site of Southwark, rose the Surrey hills, from one of which in our day the Crystal Palace gleams. Men with stone weapons slew antlered deer upon the little marshy island of Thorney, now Westminster. ”

“ I think that Mildred had a passion for noble architecture. Her keen eyes would detect beauties or incongruities where my untrained sight perceived nothing.
“If a man writes a bad poem, I am not compelled to read it; if he paints a bad picture, I need not see it more than once,” she was wont to say; “but if he erects an ugly building in my city he hurts me every time I walk the street, and I am helpless.”
“When constructive beauty costs no more than this fantastic ugliness, why must such an absurdity be inflicted upon a long-suffering public?” ”

“ I don’t mean for a moment that I believe hotel life or boarding-house life to be the life of the family of the future. Heaven forbid! That the privacy and seclusion of the individual and family should be preserved is imperative. The home is the first consideration. But that one’s food should be cooked, or one’s clothes made or washed, inside the rooms occupied by the family, seems to me no essential feature of the home, and I am convinced that where prejudice can be removed, a great gain would be made by eliminating the first and last, at least from the home of the city poor. ”

“ Some day perhaps this English nation that so loves its own great history will reclaim this historic spot, and mark Magna Charta Island with a memorial of the brave men who made it world-famous. Or perhaps,—who knows?—some American, who has spent three years at Oxford, and learned to love the history of the race from which he sprang, may be impelled to honour that which is best in her, and after placing in Cambridge and in Horton fit memorials of Milton, may be moved to erect here a worthy monument to the bold barons. ”

“ If we aren’t ready for coöperation, how can we expect them to be?”
“I ask nothing of any one,” replied Mildred, “which I would not be glad to do myself under the same conditions, or under better conditions. We are learning to coöperate in a thousand ways of which our grandfathers never dreamed. Under the pressure of new duties and interests which our age has brought with it, we are learning to eliminate useless individual work where combined work is better. The law of reciprocity is the divine law. Wasteful individual effort belongs to the age of savagery. ”

“ If he thinks of the old days when Roger Williams taught Dutch to his learned pupil, John Milton, he may let his fancy picture to him these men, who ranked among the nation-builders of their day, stepping some Sunday morning under its Gothic arches from out the greensward that then surrounded them, and listening to the gospel in the tongue of those brave exiles who, like them, had fought for freedom of conscience. ”

“ Charity! how I loathe the word! It is the iron which sears the conscience of your rich Christian as does nothing else. He thinks to buy heaven with that word.
“I tell you, Miss Brewster, these people want what you and I want. They want to preserve their self-respect, to have a chance once a week to remember that they are human beings and not machines. They want to be able in this Christian land to earn an honest living, to keep their daughters from the streets, and to keep soul and body together without sacrificing all decency and honor. ”

“ The London tourist, who visits London for the first time after 1902, will miss seeing one of its most fascinating sights, for he can never stand in the great dining-hall of Christ’s Hospital on a Sunday noon and see the procession of pink-cheeked lads in their knee-breeches and long skirts come trooping in an orderly procession into the great hall, bearing great platters of steaming meats and baskets piled with rolls. ”

“ No one, not bred in a New England home with all the Puritan traditions imbibed with every breath, can realize the fever and despair that I have felt more than once after I dared to think and face the result of my thought. But that torture can never come again. Not that I have relapsed into indifference or have heeded the pleadings of my devout friends to “only believe,” that so I might dread my doubts as impious and accept without question the creed of my fathers. ”

“ But the baldness and blankness of Gower Street and a thousand other streets is not so hopeless as the pretentious bastard Renaissance work which modern London shows. The rich modern world can not plead poverty as its excuse for ugliness. Even the village cottage of three centuries ago, as well as the city streets, showed a popular love of beauty and a power to attain it which few architects, or rather few of their patrons, permit the modern world to see. ”

“ I have all my life been preaching coöperation, not only for the poor, but for ourselves as well, but with small success.”
“The chief objection, I suppose,” said Mildred, “is, that when food is cooked in large quantities it never tastes so good. In time everything seems to get a sort of boarding-house flavor, and individual tastes cannot be consulted as in one’s own home. This may be made an objection by the rich, but that a fastidiousness about a flavor should prevent people from trying coöperation, who have all they can do to keep soul and body together, seems to me more than ridiculous.” ”

“ Before marching from the oration hall to chapel, the stewards of the day’s dinner, according to the old-fashioned rite, have wands in their hands, walk to church at the head of the procession, and sit in places of honour. The boys are already on their seats with smug fresh faces and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches, the chapel is lighted, the founder’s tomb, with its grotesque [Pg 207] carvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful lights and shadows. ”

“ It is the duty of the male citizen to vote, and not only to vote, but to attend the caucuses which alone insure the possibility of having a worthy candidate. It is also his duty to pay his taxes and keep his sidewalk clean, but his duty does not end here. It is his imperative duty as an honorable citizen to see that this subtle poison, which, bred from germs of selfishness and ignorance, is creeping through the veins of our people, shall be arrested ere a complete social upheaval teach us the painful lesson that vigilance alone is the price of liberty. ”

“ With a mind richly stored in history, and with the artist’s eye and prophet’s soul, every stone of this most venerable and beautiful of English churches must have been dear to him. It is not within the scope of this little volume even to touch upon the romantic history of this centre of English life or to examine its noble architecture, but only to indicate what may most have touched the mind and heart of the great scholar and patriot-reformer who often passed its portals on his walk from Petty France to Whitehall.
In the south aisle of the nave are buried two ladies whom Milton probably knew. ”

“ I could not be idle, you know, even with you, darling,” he answered, smiling at the bright face beside him.
“Ah, the world is large; there are many who need us; rich or poor, we will find our work somewhere,” said Mildred softly, as if to herself. Then as Jim’s steps were heard at the door she started.
“Come, Ralph, one last look at your books and room, it may be long before we return. Kiss Ruby, too; you must be her brother now, you know.” ”

“ Crutched Friars’ Church became a carpenter’s shop and tennis court; Shakespeare and his friends erected a playhouse on the site of the Black Friars’ monastery. A tavern replaced the church of St. Martin’s le Grand, and far and wide traces of the despoiler and rebuilder were manifest.
Stow had then but just written his invaluable chronicles, and little antiquarian interest prevailed. For the first time in human history men sailed around the globe. New worlds were opening to men’s visions. Not only dreams of wealth without labour, but golden actualities had dazzled the imagination of thousands. ”

“ I know poor mothers in Boston who don’t get down so far as the Common twice a year, who scarcely see a green tree from one year’s end to another, who never think they can spare a moment’s time to amuse their children, and who gladly turn the poor little ones into the street to get them away from the hot cooking-stove which occupies the best part of the only family living-room. ”

“ No more characteristic part of Milton’s London [Pg 225] exists to-day than the various Inns of Court that lead north and south from Holborn. As the sightseer passes from the jostle and turmoil of the thoroughfare, he is transported in a moment into a silence and seclusion that remind one of a Puritan Sabbath. Quadrangle opens out of quadrangle, shut in by rows of unpretentious buildings, whose monotony is broken by Gothic chapels or Tudor dining-halls surmounted by carved cupolas. ”

“ May I not hope that the life and youth and moral power of Chicago will join hand in hand in making this vast city great, not only in dimensions and numbers and wealth, but great in that kind of greatness which alone shall exalt a nation and give it memory. ”

“ It had two stories, and the upper one was occupied by the House of Commons. These walls have echoed to the ringing words of Eliot, Hampden, Pym, Sir Harry Vane, and Cromwell, to Burke and Fox and Pitt, and the long line of valiant Englishmen who never confounded patriotism and loyalty to country with subserviency to the will of any fallible man whom chance had placed upon the nation’s throne. ”

“ My classes take me to Dorchester and Cambridge and Longwood. Once a week I meet a score or so of our Boston society women in a Commonwealth Avenue drawing-room, who manage, among their thousand and one lectures, lessons, and engagements of every sort, to squeeze in an hour to hear me discourse on the topics of the day, when I try to teach them about some phases of our nineteenth century life of which they, like most women, know but little. ”

“ Occasionally a cloistered walk under low Tudor arches, or a group of highly ornate terra cotta chimneys is seen, as one wanders around the dim and shadowy passages. All at once a turn, and behold, here in the heart of the life of this six million people of the great overgrown metropolis, still stretch long reaches of greensward, locked safely from the intrusion of the public by their handsome wrought-iron gates. ”