Romance Craik, Dinah Maria: Olive. v1. 7 Sep 2013

[crutledge]

Dinah Maria Craik (born Dinah Maria Mulock, also often credited as Miss Mulock or Mrs. Craik) (20 April 1826 - 12 October 1887) was an English novelist and poet. She was born at Stoke-on-Trent and brought up in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire.

Excerpt
"Puir wee lassie, ye hae a waesome welcome to a waesome warld!"
Such was the first greeting ever received by my heroine, Olive Rothesay. However, she would be then entitled neither a heroine nor even "Olive Rothesay," being a small nameless concretion of humanity, in colour and consistency strongly resembling the "red earth," whence was taken the father of all nations. No foreshadowing of the coming life brightened her purple, pinched-up, withered face, which, as in all new-born children, bore such a ridiculous likeness to extreme old age. No tone of the all-expressive human voice thrilled through the unconscious wail that was her first utterance, and in her wide-open meaningless eyes had never dawned the beautiful human soul. There she lay, as you and I, reader, with all our compeers, lay once-a helpless lump of breathing flesh, faintly stirred by animal life, and scarce at all by that inner life which we call spirit. And, if we thus look back, half in compassion, half in humiliation, at our infantile likeness-may it not be that in the world to come some who in this world bore an outward image poor, mean, and degraded, will cast a glance of equal pity on their well-remembered olden selves, now transfigured into beautiful immortality?

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