We note that Pompeii was a paradise built beside a crater.  The traveler tells us if we strike the rocky earth it rings hollow.  Close by the calm lake is a boiling spring.  In the very heart of the orange groves rises a column of smoke and steam.  “The mist of lava jars on the music of summer, the scent of sulphur mingles with the scent of roses.”  Not for a moment can the traveler forget that beneath all this opulence of color and fragrance rages a colossal furnace.  Thus the harshness and selfishness found in the eloquence and poetry of the ancient writers rob us of all joy in their splendid gifts.  We yield homage only to the greatness that is also goodness.  To ten-talent power the hero must also add tenderness to his own, kindness to the weak, unfailing sympathy to all.  No giant is a full giant until he is also gentle, stooping to give his two mites to the weak, bearing to the weary his cup of cold water, ever emulating that hero, Sir Philip Sydney, wounded sorely indeed, but pushing away the canteen because the soldier, suffering great pain, had greater need.

In one of his essays Lowell notes that the great reform monuments are the humble deeds of humble persons, taken up and repeated by an entire people.  The final victories for liberty and religion are emblazoned upon monuments and celebrated in song and story, but the beginnings of these achievements for mankind are often given over to obscurity and forgetfulness.  Our age makes much of the “Red Cross” movement.  Hardly fifty years have passed since two English girls boarded the steamer that was to carry them to the Crimea.  Upon the distant battlefields, with their deserted cannon, wounded horses and dying men, at first these gentle girls seemed strangely out of place.  The hospitals were full; neglected soldiers were lying in the thickets, whither they had crawled to die.  Counseling with none, these brave girls moved across the battlefields like angels of mercy.  Many years have passed.  Now these nurses bring hope to every battlefield, and minister to every stricken Armenia, for the story of that sweet girl has filled the earth with “King’s Daughters.”  One hundred years ago also England left her orphan babes to grow up in the country poorhouse, midst surroundings often vulgar, profane and brutal.  One day two sweet babes, unnamed and unwelcomed, lay in the garret of a county-house in the outskirts of London.  Then a poor, half-witted spinster, hearing of the young mother’s death, found her way to the garret, brooded o’er the babes with all the dignity of our Mother of Sorrows, took the babes to her heart and planned how, with six shillings a week, she might keep bread in three hungry mouths.  Four years passed by, and one day the lord of the manor stayed a moment before this woman’s hovel and heard her prayer for the two boys clinging to her skirts.  Soon the story of the woman’s mercy was heard in every English pulpit, and in every town men and women made their way to the county-houses to take away the orphan babes and found instead some asylum for God’s little ones.  Now noble men in distant lands plan homes and shelter for little children, and the work of the obscure woman is a part of the history of reform.