“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,
      But where art thou? 
  A corner holds thine empty chair,
  Thy playthings idly scattered there,
  But speak to us of our despair!”

How sad and lonely especially is the mother who is called thus to weep the loss of her departed infant.  Oh, it is hard for her to give up that loved one whose smile and childish glee were the light and the hope of her heart.  As she lays it in the cold, damp earth, and returns to her house of mourning, and there contemplates its empty cradle, and that silent nursery, once gladsome with its mirth, she feels the sinking weight of her desolation.  No light, no luxury, no friend, can fill the place of her lost one.