gave no sob. Fred and Sophy, though but two or three years younger, and though they had seen mamma in her coffin, seemed to themselves to be looking at some strange show. What should they know of death? "They had not learnt to decipher that terrible handwriting of human destiny." Dicky had rebelled against his black clothes; and now, though he had heard Nanny say that mamma was in heaven, he had a vague notion that she would come home again tomorrow, and say he had been a good boy for submitting to the black clothes, and let him empty her work-box. "He stood close to his father, with great rosy cheeks and wide-open blue eyes, looking first up at Mr. Cleves," who was reading the burial service, and then down at the coffin, and thinking he and Chubby would play at that when they got home.

Children do not admire each other's simplicity, observes an essayist on that quality; but we admire it in them, because what is uttered without thought or intention in the child is full of meaning to us. In this writer's judgment, it was more than a simple, it was probably a stupid, little girl that kept reiterating, "We are seven;" but the words suggested deep meanings to the poet.

Mr. de Quincey has remarked, that the child in this little poem, although unable to admit the thought of death, yet, in compliance with custom, uses the word: "The first that died was little Jane." But the graves of her brother and sister she is so far from regarding as any argument of their having died, that she supposes the stranger simply to doubt her statement, and she reiterates her assertion of their graves as lying in the churchyard, in order to prove that they were living. Beside those graves she would eat her supper of summer evenings, and knit her stockings, and hem her kerchief; there would she sit, and sing to them that lay below. That authentic voice, argued Wordsworth, "which affirms life as a necessity inalienable from man's consciousness, is a revelation through the lips of childhood." Elsewhere the little poem is recognised as bringing into day for the first time a profound fact in the abysses of human nature—namely, that the mind of an infant

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cannot admit the idea of death, cannot comprehend it, “any more than the fountain of light can comprehend the aborigiIn the words (translated ones) of Leopold

nal darkness.” Schefer

"Easier to him seems life than A B C,

So willingly he sees funereal trains,
Admires the garland laid upon the coffin,
Beholds the narrow, still, last house of man,

Looks in the grave, and hears, without a fear,
The clods fall down upon the coffin lid."

You may, as Rousseau observes, teach children the name of death, but they have no idea of what it is; they fear it neither for themselves nor others; they fear suffering, not death. There are exceptions, of course; such as one of Sydney Smith's children, in delicate health, who used to wake suddenly every night, "sobbing, anticipating the death of parents, and all the sorrows of life, almost before life had begun;" and Mrs. Gore pictures one such in little Selina, wistfully watching beside her dying mother's bed, and forestalling the worst. “To children, the grave is usually too incomprehensible a mystery to be terrible. That those who are here to-day disappear to-morrow, strikes them no more than any common departure on a journey. But Selina had been more painfully instructed. Selina, having seen tears shed for weeks, and months, and years, over the image of one who, because he was dead, returned no more, understood the full force of the evil awaiting

There is a little girl in one of Lord Lytton's fictions, whom her father visits at the French nunnery from time to time, and who, "whenever monsieur goes,” one of the nuns records, "always says that he is dead, and cries herself quietly to sleep; when monsieur returns, she says he is come to life again. Some one, I suppose, once talked to her about death : and she thinks, when she loses sight of any one, that that is death." In the same story, we read of two brothers, the younger a mere child, that "Philip broke to Sidney the sad news of their mother's death, and Sidney wept with bitter passion. But children—what can they know of death? Their

tears over graves dry sooner than the dews." Addressing his daughter Edith, then ten years old, Southey says:—

"Thy happy nature from the painful thought

With instinct turns, and scarcely canst thou bear
To hear me name the grave. Thou knowest not
How large a portion of my heart is there!"

Second childhood, and something short of that, has its oneness of reckoning with the little maiden on the banks of the Wye. "But as to the children, Annie, they're all about me yet," says the grandmother in Mr. Tennyson's poem.

"Pattering over the boards, my Annie who left me at two,
Patter she goes, my sweet little Annie, an Annie like you :
Pattering over the boards, she comes and goes at her will,
While Harry is in the five-acre, and Charlie ploughing the hill.

"And Harry and Charlie, I hear them too-they sing to their team:
Often they come to the door in a pleasant kind of a dream.

They come and sit by my chair, they hover about my bed

I am not always certain if they be alive or dead."

Ever has been, and will be, admired Steele's picture of a bereaved family, with the children sorrowing according to their several ages and degrees of understanding. "And what troubled me most was, to see a little boy, who was too young to know the reason, weeping only because his sisters did." Still more simply told and touching is Steele's own retrospect of earliest grief. This was on the occasion of his father's death, when little Dick was not quite five years old; and much more amazed he was at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with him. Sir Richard remembered how he went into the room where the body lay, and saw his mother sit, weeping, alone by it; how he had his battledore in his hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa; having, he knew not how, some slight idea that papa was locked up there.

Mary Lamb illustrates the same topic in the first of her stories of Mrs. Leicester's School, where the little girl takes her newly-arrived uncle straight to the churchyard, as "the way to mamma." So does Caroline Bowles (Southey) in her

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poem of the Child's Unbelief, where a heart-sore elder is troubled by the little one's prattling about the lessons to be learnt for a dead mamma to hear, when she comes by-and-by.

"Yet what, poor infant, shouldst thou know

Of life's great mystery―

Of time and space-of chance and change—
Of sin, decay, and death ?"

description of a child's

"On the bed lay the sight of which filled

Then, again, we have in John Galt a first impression of death in the house. covered form of a mysterious thing, the my infantine spirit with solemnity and dread. The poor girl, as she looked on it, began to weep bitterly. I, too, wept, but I knew not wherefore; and I clung to her, overwhelmed with the phantasma of an unknown fear." Mr. de Quincey records the commencement of his acquaintance with mortality, in the removal of his nursery playmate and sister, Jane. Yet, in fact, he knew little more of mortality, he says, than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away, but perhaps she would come back. "Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! Gracious immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength! I was sad for Jane's absence; but still, in my heart, I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again-crocuses and roses; why not little Jane ?" In the Old Curiosity Shop, there is a suggestive picture of some children playing in a rustic churchyard. They have an infant with them, and they lay it down, asleep, upon a child's grave, in a little bed of leaves. "It was a new grave-the resting-place, perhaps, of some little creature, who, meek and patient in its illness, had often sat and watched them, and now seemed to their minds scarcely changed." A late clerical essayist, once frequent in his contributions to Blackwood, feelingly describes a village funeral-that of Farmer Q-'s good wife, the good mother to his large family; and how "the children, from sixteen years of age downward, were variously affected; the elder weeping; a middle one, probably a pet, sobbing loudly; others, below, with a fixed look, as if surprised at the strangeness of their situation. But the childish play of

the youngest, who could not, perhaps, conceive what death was, was such a vindication of the wisdom and goodness of Providence that tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, that I have often since had the scene before me." That poor child, Mr. Eagles reflects, required unconsciousness of this world's miseries, which, fully and deeply felt, would have torn its weak frame, and nipped the life in the bud; and, therefore, permanent sensibility was denied, and is denied to all such. He professes to have never seen the awfulness of death, and the newness and sportiveness of life, so brought together. "The occasion was death, and the child was at play with it, and unhurt; and I thought of the passage, 'The weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den.'

Take, again, Dr. John Brown's account of his earliest remembrance of household sorrow. He was taken to his mother's funeral, in the quiet little churchyard of Symington. He had been, he says, ever since the death, in a sort of stupid musing and wonder, not making out what it all meant. He knew that his mother was said to be dead; he saw that she was still, and laid out, and then shut up, and didn't move; but he did not know that when she was carried out in that long black box, and they all went with her, she alone was never to return. Then, too, we have a record, by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, of his first acquaintance with the shadow of death; his memory dimly recalling the image of a little girl, a schoolmate, "whom we missed one day, and were told that she had died. But what death was, I never had any very distinct idea, until one day I climbed the low stone wall of the old burial-ground, and mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long, narrow hole, dug down through the grim sod, down through the brown loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man seen through an opening at one end of it." When the lid was closed, and the gravel and stone rattled down pell-mell, and the mourners had gone, and left their dead one behind, then our boy-gazer felt he had seen death, and should never forget him. But this is a stage