hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch
came again,--working at one figure for months, and, when it was
finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of
disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to
feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.

I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there
among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that
you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night.
I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in
vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has
groped through as boy and man,--the slow, heavy years of
constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks
sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that
it will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a
fierce thirst for beauty,--to know it, to create it; to
be--something, he knows not what,--other than he is. There are
moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple
thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him to a
passion of pain,--when his nature starts up with a mad cry of
rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile,
slimy life upon him. With all this groping, this mad desire, a
great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet's
heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer,
familiar with sights and words you would blush to name. Be
just: when I tell you about this night, see him as he is. Be
just,--not like man's law, which seizes on one isolated fact,
but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the
countless cankering days of this man's life, all the countless
nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him,