Now the liability to the loss of children—or rather what renders us sensible of it, the occasional loss itself-seems to be one of these necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity. We do not mean that every one must lose one of his children in order. to enjoy the rest; or that every individual loss afflicts us in the same proportion. We allude to the deaths of infants in general. These might be as few as we could render them. But if none at all ever took place, we should regard every little child as a man or woman secured; and it will easily be conceived what a world of endearing cares and hopes this security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose its continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been men and women On the other hand, those who have lost an infant, are never, as it were, without an infant child. They are the only persons who, in one sense, retain it always, and they furnish their neighbors with the same idea.* The other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality. This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.

at once.

Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes that visit our fancy and hopes. They are the ever-smiling emblems of joy; the prettiest pages that wait upon imagination. Lastly, "Of these are the kingdom of heaven." Wherever there is a province of that benevolent and all-accessible empire, whether on earth or elsewhere, such are the gentle spirits that must inhabit it. To such simplicity, or the resemblance of it, must they come. Such must be the ready confidence of their hearts, and creativeness of their fancy. And so ignorant must they be of the "knowledge of good and evil," losing their discernment of that self-created trouble, by enjoying the garden before them, and not being ashamed of what is kindly and innocent.

"I sighed," says old Captain Dalton, "when I envied you the two bonnie children; but I sigh not now to call either the monk or the soldier mine own. Monastery, vol. iii., p. 341.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Poetical Anomalies of Shape.

IT is not one of the least instances of the force of habit to see how poetry and mythology can reconcile us to shapes, or rather combinations of shape, unlike anything in nature. The dogheaded deities of the Egyptians were doubtless not so monstrous in their eyes as in ours. The Centaurs of the Greeks, as Ovid has shown us, could be imagined possessing beauty enough for a human love story; and our imaginations find nothing at all monstrous in the idea of an angel, though it partakes of the nature of the bird. The angel, it is true, is the least departure from humanity. Its wings are not an alteration of the human shape, but an addition to it. Yet, leaving a more awful wonder out of the question, we should be startled to find pinions growing out of the shoulder-blades of a child; and we should wait with anxiety to see of what nature the pinions were, till we became reconciled to them. If they turned out to be ribbed and webbed, like those of the imaginary dragon, conceive the horror! If, on the other hand, they became feathers, and tapered off, like those of a gigantic bird, combining also grace and splendor, as well as the power of flight, we can hardly fancy ourselves reconciled to them. And yet again, on the other hand, the flying women, described in the Adventures of Peter Wilkins, do not shock us, though their wings partake of the ribbed and webbed nature, and not at all of the feathered. We admire Peter's gentle and beautiful bride, notwithstanding the phenomenon of the graundee, its light whalebone-like intersections, and its power of dropping about her like drapery. It even becomes a matter of pleasant curiosity. We find it not at all in the way. We can readily apprehend the delight he felt at possessing a creature so kind

and sensitive; and can sympathize with him in the happiness of that bridal evening, equally removed from prudery and grossness, which he describes with a mixture of sentiment and voluptuousness beyond all the bridals we ever read.

To imagine anything like a sympathy of this kind, it is of course necessary that the difference of form should consist in addition, and not in alteration. But the un-angel-like texture of the flying apparatus of fair Youwarkee (such, if we remember, is her name) helps to show us the main reason why we are able to receive pleasure from the histories of creatures only halfhuman. The habit of reading prevents the first shock; but we are reconciled in proportion to their possession of what we are pleased to call human qualities. Kindness is the great elevator. The Centaurs may have killed all the Lapithæ, and shown considerable generalship to boot, without reconciling us to the brute part of them; but the brutality melts away before the story of their two lovers in Ovid. Drunkenness and rapine made beasts of them;-sentiment makes human beings. Polyphemus in Homer is a shocking monster, not because he has only one eye, but because he murders and eats our fellow-creatures. But in Theocritus, where he is Galatea's lover, and sits hopelessly lamenting his passion, we only pity him. His deformity even increases our pity. We blink the question of beauty, and become one-eyed for his sake. Nature seems to do him an injustice in gifting him with sympathies so human, and at the same time prevent them from being answered; and we feel impatient with the all-beautiful Galatea, if we think she ever showed him scorn as well as unwillingness. We insist upon her avoiding him with the greatest possible respect.

These fictions of the poets, therefore, besides the mere excitement which they give the imagination, assist remotely to break the averseness and uncharitableness of human pride. And they may blunt the point of some fancies that are apt to come upon melancholy minds. When Sir Thomas Brown, in the infinite range of his metaphysical optics, turned his glass, as he no doubt often did, towards the inhabitants of other worlds, the stories of angels and Centaurs would help his imaginative good

:

nature to a more willing conception of creatures in other planets unlike those on earth: to other "lords of creation ;" and other, and perhaps nobler humanities, noble in spirit, though different in form. If indeed there can be anything in the starry endlessness of existence, nobler than what we can conceive of love and generosity.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Spring and Daisies.

SPRING, while we are writing, is complete. The winds have done" their work. The shaken air, well tempered and equalised, has subsided; the genial rains, however thickly they may come, do not saturate the ground, beyond the power of the sun to dry it up again. There are clear crystal mornings; noons of blue sky and white cloud; nights, in which the growing moon seems to lie looking at the stars, like a young shepherdess at her flock. A few days ago she lay gazing in this manner at the solitary evening star, like Diana, on the slope of a valley, looking up at Endymion. His young eye seemed to sparkle out upon the world; while she, bending inwards, her hands behind her head, watched him with an enamored dumbness.

But this is the quiet of Spring. Its voices and swift movements have come back also. The swallow shoots by us, like an embodied ardor of the season. The glowing bee has his will of the honied flowers, grappling with them as they tremble. We have not yet heard the nightingale or the cuckoo; but we can hear them with our imagination, and enjoy them through the content of those who have.

Then the young green. This is the most apt and perfect mark of the season,—the true issuing forth of the Spring. The trees and bushes are putting forth their crisp fans; the lilac is loaded with bud; the meadows are thick with the bright young grass, running into sweeps of white and gold with the daisies and buttercups. The orchards announce their riches, in a shower of silver blossoms. The earth in fertile woods is spread with yellow and blue carpets of primroses, violets, and hyacinths, over which the birch-trees, like stooping nymphs, hang with their thickening hair. Lilies-of-the-valley, stocks, columbines, lady.