e that once breathed music to your soul. Like the
folding up of the rose, it passed away; that beautiful bud which bloomed
and cheered your heart, was transplanted ere the storm beat upon it:--

"Death found strange beauty on that polished brow,
And dashed it out--
There was a tint of rose
On cheek and lip. He touched the veins with ice,
And the rose faded.
Forth from those blue eyes
There spake a wishful tenderness, a doubt
Whether to grieve or sleep, which innocence
Alone may wear. With ruthless haste he bound
The silken fringes of those curtained lids
Forever.
There had been a murmuring sound,
With which the babe would claim its mother's ear,
Charming her even to tears. The spoiler set
His seal of silence.
But there beamed a smile
So fixed, so holy, from that cherub brow,
Death gazed--and left it there.
He dared not steal
The signet-ring of heaven!"

The death of such an infant is indeed a sore affliction, and causes the
bleeding heart of the parent to cry out, "Whose sorrow is like unto my
sorrow!" Unfeeling Death! that thou shouldst thus blight the fair flowers
and nip the unfolding buds of promise in the Christian home!

"Death! thou dread looser of the dearest tie,
Was there no aged and no sick one nigh?
No languid wretch who long'd, but long'd in vain,
For thy cold hand to cool his fiery pain?
And was the only victim thou couldst find,
An infant in its mother's arms reclined?"

Thus it is that death often turns from the sickly to the healthy, from the
decrepitude of age to the strong man in his prime, from the miserable
wretch who longs for the grave to the smiling babe upon its mother's
breast, and there in those "azure veins which steal like streams along a
field of snow," he pours his putrefying breath, and leaves within that
mother's arms nothing but loathsomeness and ruin! It was thus, bereaved
parents, that he came within your peaceful home, and threw a cruel mockery
over all your visions of delight, over all the joys and hopes and interests
of your fireside, personifying their wreck in the cold and ghastly corpse
of your child. All that is now left to you is, the memorials around you
that once the pride of your heart was there;--

"The nursery shows thy pictured wall,
Thy bat, thy bow,
Thy cloak and bonnet, club and ball,
Bu