Youth_ Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene - G. Stanley Hall

and where the pungent air poisons the blood of the pale weaver girls; the fate of
the mason who felt from a high roof and struck the stone flagging, whose funeral
she attends, all inspire her to sing occasionally the songs of enfranchised labor.
Misery as a drear, toothless ghost visits her, as when gloomy pinions had
overspread her dying mother's bed, to wrench with sharp nails all the hope from
her breast with which she had defied it. A wretched old man on the street
inspires her to sing of what she imagines is his happy though humble prime.
There is the song of the pickaxe brandished in revolution when mobs cry "Peace,
labor bread," and in mines of industry beneath the earth. She loves the
"defeated" in whose house no fire glows, who live in caves and dens, and writes
of the mutilation of a woman in the factory machinery. At eighteen years "a
loom, two handsome eyes that know no tears, a cotton dress, a love, belong to
me." She is inspired by a master of the forge beating a red-hot bar, with his bare
neck swelled. He is her demon, her God, and her pride in him is ecstasy. She
describes jealousy of two rival women, so intense that they fight and bite, and
the pure joy of a guileless, intoxicating, life-begetting first kiss. She longs for
infinite stretches of hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop wildly on her
steed; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles; revels in the hurricane, and
would rise in and fly and whirl with it adrift far out in the immensity of space.
She tells us, "Of genius and light I'm a blithe, millionaire," and elsewhere she
longs for the everlasting ice of lofty mountains, the immortal silence of the Alps;
sings of her "sad twenty years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and spent."
She imagines herself springing into the water which closes over her, while her
naked soul, ghostly pale, whirls past through the lonely dale. She imprecates the
licentious world of crafty burghers, coquettes, gamblers, well-fed millionaires,
cursed geese and serpents that make the cowardly vile world, and whom she
would smite in the face with her indignant verse. "Thou crawlest and I soar." She
chants the champions of the spade, hammer, pick, though they are ground and
bowed with toil, disfigured within, with furrowed brows. She pants for war with
outrage and with wrong; questions the abyss for its secret; hears moans and
flying shudders; and sees phantoms springing from putrid tombs. The full moon
is an old malicious spy, peeping stealthily with evil eye. She is a bird caught in a
cursed cage, and prays some one to unlock the door and give her space and light,
and let her soar away in ecstasy and glory. Nothing less than infinite space will
satisfy her. Even the tempest, the demon, or a malevolent spirit might bear her
away on unbridled wings. In one poem she apostrophizes Marie Bashkirtseff as
warring with vast genius against unknown powers, but who now is in her coffin
among worms, her skull grinning and showing its teeth. She would be possessed
by her and thrilled as by an electric current. A dwarf beggar wrings her heart