will know. I would not wish to see you laid Within an early tomb; I should forget how you betray'd, And only weep your doom:
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THE LITTLE
25 But this is fitting punishment, To live and love in vain,-?Oh my wrung heart, be thou content, And feed upon his pain. 30Go thou and watch her lightest sigh,? Thine own it will not be; And bask beneath her sunny eye,? It will not turn on thee.
'Tis well: the rack, the chain, the wheel, Far better had'st thou proved; 35 Ev'n I could almost pity feel, For thou art not beloved.
The Little Shroud
She put him on a snow-white shroud, A chaplet0 on his head; And gather'd early primroses To scatter o'er the dead.
5 She laid him in his little grave? 'Twas hard to lay him there, When spring was putting forth its flowers, And every thing was fair.
She had lost many children?now io The last of them was gone; And day and night she sat and wept Beside the funeral stone.
One midnight, while her constant tears
Were falling with the dew, 15 She heard a voice, and lo! her child Stood by her weeping too!
His shroud was damp, his face was white: He said,?'I cannot sleep, Your tears have made my shroud so wet; 20 Oh, mother, do not weep!'
Oh, love is strong!?the mother's heart Was filled with tender fears; Oh, love is strong!?and for her child Her grief restrained its tears.
25 One eve a light shone round her bed, And there she saw him stand?
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Her infant, in his little shroud, A taper in his hand.
'Lo! mother, see my shroud is dry, And I can sleep once more!' And beautiful the parting smile The little infant wore.
And down within the silent grave He laid his weary head; 35 And soon the early violets Grew o'er his grassy bed.
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The Victorian As e
1830-1901
1832: The First Reform Bill 1837: Victoria becomes queen 1846: The Corn Laws repealed 1850: Tennyson succeeds Wordsworth as poet laureate 1851: The Great Exhibition in London 1859: Charles Darwin's Origin of Species published 1870?71: Franco-Prussian War 1901: Death of Victoria
In 1897 Mark Twain was visiting London during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's coming to the throne. 'British history is two thousand years old,' Twain observed, 'and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together.' And if the whole world had 'moved' during that long lifetime and reign of Victoria's, it was in her own country itself that the change was most marked and dramatic, a change that brought England to its highest point of development as a world power.
In the eighteenth century the pivotal city of Western civilization had been Paris; by the second half of the nineteenth century this center of influence had shifted to London, a city that expanded from about two million inhabitants when Victoria came to the throne to six and a half million at the time of her death. The rapid growth of London is one of the many indications of the most important development of the age: the shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. 'We have been living, as it were, the life of three hundred years in thirty' was the impression formed by Dr. Thomas Arnold during the early stages of England's industrialization. By the end of the century?after the resources of steam power had been more fully exploited for fast railways and iron ships, looms, printing presses, and farmers' combines, and after the introduction of the telegraph, intercontinental cable, photography, anesthetics, and universal compulsory education?a late Victorian could look back with astonishment on these developments during his or her lifetime. Walter Besant, one of these late Victorians, observed that so completely transformed were 'the mind and habits of the ordinary Englishman' by 1897, 'that he would not, could he see him, recognize his own grandfather.'
Because England was the first country to become industrialized, its transformation was an especially painful one: it experienced a host of social and
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economic problems consequent to rapid and unregulated industrialization. England also experienced an enormous increase in wealth. An early start enabled England to capture markets all over the globe. Cotton and other manufactured products were exported in English ships, a merchant fleet whose size was without parallel in other countries. The profits gained from trade led also to extensive capital investments in all continents. After England had become the world's workshop, London became, from 1870 on, the world's banker. England gained
