| Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Children Are Precious Harvest WORDSWORTH wrote four in his poem to the that go like oft when on my couch I in idle or In pensive they flash upon that Inward eye that Is the bliss of and then my heart with rapture fills and dances with the That inward eye that Is the bliss of solitude is a source of rare comfort to us when this year's Fourth of July brings us so much that is We are living in a strange time of change and and on all sides Insoluble problems beset Juvenile broken high high high angry words In high places there's just too much of It And it has become too easy and too common to get the report on popular young gone off her rocker you back in the psychopathic or acting so queerly that they've sent him And as these clouds and It takes real faith and strength of spirit to disperse I like to think back across the easier and take out memories to review and China Visit for Rural not Europeanized Shanghai and Swarming country level rice fields between sluggish Muddy dwellings framing muddy swarms of ivory-skinned men and women in mud- against hopeless odds colored Jealously guarding the rice that shifts about in a little To one respectable old amah in China I gave a square of dark green It was hot summer but when Amah next appeared she had felt sewed In neat squares over her quilted thick on and between her working hard all her 60 had no room of her no no small privacy anywhere to store that treasure against the bitter She put it she could keep And she is typical of More warming half-naked snatching bits of food from the hanging about the hotel impoverished in the midst of fabulous where a hundred and whining mendicants may be knocked down In the scramble for a few thrown So much work to such hard such poor Everyone a faint scowl the national And the old woman upon whom I called sharing two rooms with a boy and a young and showing me matches that lit when and a gas stove we would consider as dated about Europe's People with the children herding geese for and maca- hanging in fringes over the dark doorways of basement hovels on Naples with everything for the and pinched courage and gaiety for the Paris where the very children look sharp and Belgium no need to talk of And mighty England standing in long queues for not-too-appetizing And then the Inward eye comes back to another where the streets blaze with colored lights at and the motor cars nudge one another going to the ball and children troop to school in blazing socks showing under their and popcorn and chocolate bars are on every and poverty rises to and prosperity reigns in thousands and thousands of wide-spread between the great clean And It comes to the figure of a weary old soldier in a buff ami-blue it turns to fighting against hopeless enduring unspeakable believing in his dream of a free people In a free and bequeathing to us the reality of that And the figure of another but holding us giving the vigils of long night hours that the nation might and in the end giving his life for it is good to get home in one's good to get back under one's own and realize for just what miracles the Fourth of July There Is no nation in the whole world that can give its people what we or one-half of There is no nation whose constitution permits the Independence of thought and |
