Jacob Riis, in “The Making of an American,” brings from his
Danish homeland a most beautiful and significant phrase. There
is scant sunlight over there in the long, cold winters, and
it is not easy to make plants grow. Yet the poor have their
window-boxes and winter blossoms, nevertheless, and their tender
winter lesson. For when they speak of their flowers they do not
say that they have been grown; instead, with finest insight,
they say that they have been “loved up.”
Almost any man can be “loved up.” So it is with the child, the waif of
society.
(1925)