Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/75

Rh and not to contain anything included in the previous, the 1838, collection. One important piece to be in this new work had appeared in Blackwood for August, under the title of "The Cry of the Children." It had been suggested by the Report of Horne on "The Employment of Children in Mines and Manufactories." He had been appointed by the Government an Assistant Commissioner to the Commission appointed to inquire into the subject, and his evidence, says Miss Barrett, excited her to write the poem named "The Cry of the Children." This poem, which Edgar Poe well characterised as "full of a nervous unflinching energy—a horror sublime in its simplicity—of which Dante himself might have been proud"—created quite a sensation on its appearance, and has been deemed, with much show of probability, to have hastened and helped the passing of the initial Act of Parliament restricting the employment of children of tender years. The poem is grand in its pathos and passion, in the simplicity of its suffering children, and the hardly restrained and lofty anger at their treatment. Some stanzas should be cited, if only to show what a lofty position their author had now achieved in the realms of poetry:—