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into the fire; what is the best color for a coat, black, white, red or grey, and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean, with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent."

Kirke White wrote verses to his mother. Moore, in a poem addressed to his mother, compares his affections to the branches of the Banyan tree, that turn again to the soil from which they sprung. Milton addressed Latin verses to his

father, in which he gratefully thanks him for his education. But, perhaps, there can be found no filial tribute which has more feeling and poetry than the lines of Pope :

Me let the tender office long engage

To rock the cradle of reposing age,

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,

Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death ;
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,

And keep awhile one parent from the sky.

We may conclude this subject with one of the most striking examples of filial piety to be found in history; that of the daughter who suckled a parent in prison under sentence of starvation, with her own milk. Pliny relates the circumstance of a Temple, dedicated to Filial Piety, being erected on the occasion. Lord Byron describes the scene—

An old man, and a female young and fair,
Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose veins

The blood is nectar :-but what doth she there

With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?

Lo! here youth offers to old age the food,

The milk of its own gift :-it is her Sire
To whom she renders back the debt of blood
Born with her birth. No, he shall not expire,

1557

While in those warm and lovely veins the fire

Of health and holy feeling can provide

Great Nature's Nile, whose deep stream rises higher

Than Egypt's river:—from that gentle side

Drink,drink and live, old man! Heaven's realm holds no such tide.

The starry fable of the milky way
Has not thy story's purity, it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,

And sacred nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds. O holiest nurse!
No drop of the clear stream its way shall miss
To thy sire's heart, replenishing its source
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.

FINIS.

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