Open the window, wide. How serene and peaceful it is out yonder, where the stars gleam and sparkle—some faint and small as a diamond speck, others large, clear, and dazzling, as the eyes of angels gazing through the dim void earthward to that little room where Baby sleeps the sleep of death. It may have been the shadowing of that radiance, attendant on the sinless ones, whom we call angels, which had cast athwart the infant’s features a sheen of glory, and changed them into the seeming of a sleeping cherub, or perchance the immortal glow that shimmered, widening and circling as it fell, was but the forerunner of that celestial band who bridge space and suffer little children to go unto Him!
See the mother kneeling beside her dead babe, her slender frame convulsed with agony. Not a tear, not a sob, that breaks forth for her lost [[260]]darling but freights its newly awakened soul and holds it backward from the angels. How can it soar while the kindred spirit below wails its absence, and every moan shouts, trumpet tongued, “Come back! Come back!”
“It was my world,” she says, “my whole world, and it has gone from me like a vision. Alas! Common things live on; earth’s mighty heart still throbs! Creation lifts its voice in sea and air, and in the world’s great mart. Music, life, and motion are everywhere, save in my babe.”
Alas! for thee, fond mother, whose vision mounts no higher than the baby’s cot. Alas! for thee!
Frail, yet beautiful, were the creatures who entered at the open window. Softly as kindly thoughts that gathered round the infant sleeper in wonder, and laid a ring of flowers about it, until they formed a rosy cradle. And then, as the sighing wind or those more delicate strains heard in dreams, the voices of the elfins rose upon the stillness of the night like silver bells.
Solemn was their chant, and weird and fanciful, which anon changed to lighter vein and measure. The mourner heard the sounds, and wondered as the cadence rose and fell upon her grief-dulled ears, but the singers were invisible to her. [[261]]
“Nurslings of the summer air
Buzz, buzz, here, there.
So we! quaint and gay,
Antic gambol,