smiled lonely in the
house, the sole delight of her eyes, or bloomed among other flowers, now
all drooping for its sake--nor yet call the father unhappy who lays his
sweet son below the earth, and returns to the home where his voice is to
be heard never more. That affliction brings forth feelings unknown
before in his heart; calming all turbulent thoughts by the settled peace
of the grave. Then every page of the Bible is beautiful--and beautiful
every verse of poetry that thence draws its inspiration. Thus in the
pale and almost ghost-like countenance of decay, our hearts are not
touched by the remembrance alone of beauty which is departed, and by the
near extinction of loveliness which we behold fading before our
eyes--but a beauty, fairer and deeper far, lies around the hollow eye
and the sunken cheek, breathed from the calm air of the untroubled
spirit that has heard resigned the voice that calls it away from the dim
shades of mortality. Well may that beauty be said to be religious; for
in it speaks the soul, conscious, in the undreaded dissolution of its
earthly frame, of a being destined to everlasting bliss. With every deep
emotion arising from our contemplation of such beauty as this--religious
beauty beaming in the human countenance, whether in joy or sadness,
health or decay--there is profoundly interfused a sense of the soul's
spirituality, which silently sheds over the emotion something celestial
and divine, rendering it not only different in degree, but altogether
distinct in kind, from all the feelings that things merely perishable
can inspire--so that the spirit is fully satisfied, and the feeling of
beauty is but a vivid recognition of its own deathless being and
ethereal essence. This is a feeling of beauty which was but faintly
known to the human heart in those ages of the world when all other
feelings of beauty were most perfect; and accordingly we find, in the
most pathetic strains of their elegiac poetry, lamentations over the
beauty intensely worshipped in the dust, which was to lie for ever over
its now beamless head. But to the Christian who may have seen the living
lustre leave the eye of some beloved friend, there must have shone a
beauty in his latest smile, which spoke not alone of a brief scene
closed, but of an endless scene unfolding; while its cessation, instead
of leaving him in utter darkness, seemed to be accompanied with a burst
of light.

Much of our most fashionable Modern Poetry is