glyphic of His most distant truth. The solitude in
life is deep for the millions who have none to love them, and deep for
those who suffer by secret and incommunicable woe and have none to pity
them. Thus, be you assured that though infancy talks least of that which
slumbers deepest, it yet rests in its own transcendent solitude. But
infancy, you say, talks surely most of that which is uppermost in its
heart. Yes, doubtless of that which is uppermost, but not at all of that
which slumbers below the foundations of its heart.

[And then follows a suggestion to put in a note:]

I except one case, the case of any child who is marked for death by
organic disease, and knows it. In such cases the creature is
changed--that which would have been unchildlike ceases to offend, for a
new character is forming.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the story of the young soldier who told his officer, on having
been struck by him, that 'he would make him repent it.' (Close of
autobiographic sketch, 'Infant Literature.')

[2] Three thousand children are annually burnt to death in the nations
of England and Scotland, chiefly through the carelessness of parents. I
shudder to add another and darker cause, which is a deep disgrace to the
present age.

[3] Count Massigli (an Austrian officer in the imperial service) about
sixty years ago fathomed and attempted to fathom many parts of the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic. If I remember rightly, he found the
bottom within less than an English mile.

[4] The story and the verses are, or used to be, well known. A
schoolboy, forbidden to return home at the holidays, is suspected to
have written the lyrical Latin verses upon the rapture of returning
home, and to have breathed out his life in the anguish of thus reviving
the images which for him were never to be realized.... The reader must
not fancy any flaw in the Latin title. It is elliptic; _revisere_ being
understood, or some similar word.

[5] I allude to the _signatures_ of nature.

_II. THE LOVELIEST SIGHT FOR WOMAN'S EYES._

The loveliest sight that a woman's eye opens upon in this world is her
first-born child; and the holiest sight upon which the eyes of God
settle in Almighty sanction and perfect blessing is the love which soon
kindles between the mother and her infant: mute and speechless on the
one side, with no language but tears and kisses and looks. Beautiful is
the philosophy ... which arises out of that reflection or passio