Essays from 'Blackwood' Author:Anne Mozley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HYMNS OF THE POPULACE. It is a notorious difficulty for one class to put itself iuto the position of another, to adopt its tone of feeling, to comprehend its ... more »leading motives of action, its distinctive prejudices, prepossessions, and impulses; its likes and dislikes, and those constant pervading influences which form character, and lie at the root of the differences which separate order from order, and keep them at such an impassable distance from real intimacy. High and low, gentlemen and artisans, master and servant, ladies and poor folks, encounter one another at certain points and in particular relations ; but the most discerning cannot pretend to see into one another much beyond their point of contact. Employers, clergymen, benevolent visitors, carry their own atmosphere with them wherever they go, and things are seen and coloured through its medium. In their presence mutual interests are discussed from a non-natural point of view. The minds of both parties relax out of a certain tension and artificial conditionwhen removed from the contact and espionage of an unsympathising witness. This implies no design, no deception of any kind, probably no knowledge of check or impediment to a more perfect understanding. It is only that neither party can display any large or clear picture of themselves where the mind, to be informed, is so ill prepared to receive a comprehensive idea. Hence an inevitable mutual reticence. The superior must keep back something from the dependant; the most devoted pastor has an easy privacy he does not desire to admit his poorer flock into; the lady does not care that the humble object of her bounty should be able to picture her in the unrestraint of her drawing- room life; and in like manner the labourer, the " hand," the good woman that stands before h...« less