uincey or Dickens, but
the tone in these books is commonly more tender and inclining to
melancholy. What, for instance, could be more heart-moving than these
passages of his on the death of little children?

"I scarcely know how it is, but the deaths of children seem to me
always less premature than those of elder persons. Not that they are
in fact so; but it is because they themselves have little or no
relation to time or maturity. Life seems a race which they have yet
to run entirely. They have made no progress toward the goal. They
are born--nothing further. But it seems hard, when a man has toiled
high up the steep hill of knowledge, that he should be cast like
Sisyphus, downward in a moment; that he who has worn the day and
wasted the night in gathering the gold of science should be, with
all his wealth of learning, all his accumulations, made bankrupt at
once. What becomes of all the riches of the soul, the piles and
pyramids of precious thoughts which men heap together? Where are
Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where
is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and
Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and
dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt
will last three thousand years! I am content to believe that the
mind of man survives (somewhere or other) his clay.

"I was once present at the death of a little child. I will not pain
the reader by portraying its agonies; but when its breath was gone,
its _life_, (nothing more than a cloud of smoke!) and it lay like a
waxen image before me, I turned my eyes to its moaning mother, and
sighed out my few words of comfort. But I am a beggar in grief. I
can feel and sigh and look kindly, I think; but I have nothing to
give. My tongue deserts me. I know the inutility of too soon
comforting. I know that _I_ should weep were I the loser, and I let
the tears have their way. Sometimes a word or two I can muster: a
'Sigh no more!' and 'Dear lady, do not grieve!' but further I am
mute and useless."

I have many letters and kind little notes which Procter used to write me
during the years I knew him best. His tricksy fancies peeped out in his
correspondence, and several of his old friends in England thought no
literary man of his time had a better epistolary style. His neat