felt it necessary to say that the words had been used "at our
brother's request," and that it was his own decision to write below
them, "For this cause came I into the world."

We have accepted the stranger as we accept many things in Tiverton.
Parson and doctor kept his secret well. He is quite safe from our
questioning; but for years I expected a lady, always young and full of
grief, to seek out his grave and shrive him with her tears. She will not
appear now, unless she come as an old, old woman, to lie beside him. It
is too late.

One more record of our vanished time,--this full of poesy only, and the
pathos of farewell. It was not the aged and heartsick alone who lay down
here to rest. We have been no more fortunate than others. Youth and
beauty came also, and returned no more. This, where the white rose-bush
grows untended, was the young daughter of a squire in far-off days: too
young to have known the pangs of love or the sweet desire of Death, save
that, in primrose time, he always paints himself so fair. I have
thought the inscription must have been borrowed from another grave, in
some yard shaded by yews and silent under the cawing of the rooks;
perhaps, from its stiffness, translated from a stately Latin verse. This
it is, snatched not too soon from oblivion; for a few more years will
wear it quite away:--

"Here lies the purple flower of a maid Having to envious Death due
tribute paid. Her sudden Loss her Parents did lament, And all her
Friends with grief their hearts did Rent. Life's short. Your wicked
Lives amend with care, For Mortals know we Dust and Shadows are."

"The purple flower of a maid!" All the blossomy sweetness, the fragrant
lamenting of Lycidas, lies in that one line. Alas, poor
love-lies-bleeding! And yet not poor according to the barren pity we
accord the dead, but dowered with another youth set like a crown upon
the unstained front of this. Not going with sparse blossoms ripened or
decayed, but heaped with buds and dripping over in perfume. She seems so
sweet in her still loveliness, the empty promise of her balmy spring,
that for a moment fain are you to snatch her back into the pageant of
your day. Reading that phrase, you feel the earth is poorer for her
loss. And yet not so, since the world holds other greater worlds as
well. Elsewhere she may have grown to age and stature; but here she
lives yet in beauteous permanence,--as true a part of youth and joy and
rapture as the immortal