from earth, following in fancy her growth into a fair maiden in her heavenly Father's mansion:

"Day after day we think what she is doing
In those bright realms of air ;

Year after year her tender steps pursuing,
Behold her grown more fair.

Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken
The bond which nature gives,

Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken,
May reach her where she lives."

As one thought of past tenderness has a stronger grief-assuaging spell than all the words of comfort in the world, so does a memory of unkindness poison what might else have proved the healing fountain of our tears. For this bitterest pang of bereavement, the genial Irish poet, William Carleton, has found a suggestion of comfort:

"If ever we meet in heaven, I shouldn't think it queer

If we loved each other the better for having quarrell'd here."

It may be Irish, but it is very human.

To the remorseful dweller on bygone feuds and failures in affection, no less than for the heart that is innocent of reproach, a love which has passed through the ordeal of death, comes out radiant with a new revealing light. There is as much truth as beauty in Coventry Patmore's image in "The Victories of Love":

"Love an eternal temper took,

Dipp'd, glowing, in Death's icy brook."

And the same harsh measure that baptizes love in immortality also washes away from it those stains and blemishes which deface its image here.

That is a golden grief, however dark though some of its memories may be, that can dwell in delighted reverie on the eternity to come wherein the pent-up treasures of love and devotion may be poured at the beloved one's feet; when the mourner can say, with Tennyson, to the swiftly passing seasons in their

Course

"O days and hours, your work is this,
To hold me from my proper place,
A little while from his embrace,
For fuller gain of after bliss:

That out of distance might ensue

Desire of nearness doubly sweet;

And unto meeting when we meet,

Delight a hundredfold accrue."

Till the sorrow for the days of happy communion gone by is merged at last in this prospect of bliss to be.

And thus, gradually, one learns to look to heaven as the true home, into which one's treasures are being gathered. "The future world seems so like a real home," wrote Princess Alice, on the death of her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, "for there are so many dear ones to meet again."

"'Tis sweet, as year by year we lose
Friends out of sight, in faith to muse

How grows in Paradise our store."

And the thought that the last departed has gone to swell the bliss of those already assembled on the faroff shore, is itself a drop of sweetness in the bitter cup. "He's gone to his mother, and if I'm sorry, she's

1 Keble.

glad!" cries a bereaved father in one of George MacDonald's stories.

The very perfection of comfort is contained in Landor's poem to Mary Lamb on the death of her brother Charles. It would indeed be a golden grief that could appropriate all its items of consolation. Praise of the departed, that most soothing strain to the survivor's ear; the suggestion of his sympathy with the sorrow left behind him; and the prospect of reunion with him under the lost conditions of human blessedness in a region where human griefs can never

"Comfort thee, O thou mourner, yet awhile!

Again shall Elia's smile

Refresh thy heart, where heart can ache no more.
What is it we deplore?

He leaves behind him, freed from griefs and years,
Far worthier things than tears.

The love of friends without a single foe;
Unequalled lot below!

His gentle soul, his genius, these are thine;
For these dost thou repine ?

He may have left the lowly walks of men;
Left them he has ; what then?

Are not his footsteps followed by the eyes
Of all the good and wise?

Though the warm day is over, yet they seek
Upon the lofty peak

Of his pure mind the roseate light that glows
O'er death's perennial snows.

Behold him! from the region of the blest
He speaks: he bids thee rest."

Some of these, the loftier of these sources of

comfort may fail; but there is still left the mercy of

God to rest upon; the thought of the love that gave, and that took away, and that can as easily give again. "Believe me," says Longfellow, "upon the margin of celestial streams alone those simples grow which cure the heart-ache."

"Heaven overarches you and me,

And all earth's gardens and her graves.
Look up with me, until we see

The day break and the shadows flee.
What though to-night wrecks you and me
If so to-morrow saves?":

I

I Christina Rossetti.

ΧΙ

WITH SAFETY OF THEIR INNOCENCE

Something to me delicious in the thought that one who dies a baby presents to the glorified Saviour and Redeemer that same sweet face of infancy which He blessed when on earth, and sanctified with a kiss, and solemnly pronounced to be the type and sacrament of regeneration."

Coleridge: "Animâ Poeta."

THE deaths of little children, without any apparent purpose being accomplished by their birth, has seemed to many one of the saddest problems of existence. And yet it has done more perhaps to keep mankind in touch with heaven than all the words of prophets and the lives of saints.

Little ones caught away before time has had the chance to spoil them, and who carry their innocence unspotted back to heaven, remain the eternal children. And many who have been blind and deaf to all other influences are fain to yield to the guidance of the baby hands that, in James W. Riley's phrase,

It

66 . . absent thus
Beckon us."

was Moses Mendelssohn, the German-Jew philosopher, who wrote to a friend on the death of his