Gentle as the ring-doves are,
And be lovely as a star!
This nani-nani calls to mind some words in a letter of Sydney Dobell's: "A little girl-child! The very idea is the most exquisite of poems! a child-daughter—wherein it seems to me that the spirit of all dews and flowers and springs and tender, sweet wonders 'strikes its being into bounds.'" "Tear drop" (lacrimiòra) is the poetic Roumanian name for the lily of the valley. It may be needful to add that gilliflower is the English name for the clove-pink; at least an explanatory foot-note is now attached to the word in new editions of the old poets. Exiled from the polite society of "bedding plants"—all heads and no bodies—the "matted and clove gilliflowers" which Bacon wished to have in his garden, must be sought for by the door of the cottager who speaks of them fondly yet apologetically, as "old-fashioned things." To the folk-singers of the small Italy on the Danube and the great Italy on the Arno they are still the type of the choicest excellence, of the most healthful grace. Even the long stalk, which has been the flower's undoing, from a worldly point of view, gets praised by the unsophisticated Tuscan. "See," he says, "with how lordly an air it holds itself in the hand!" ("Guarda con quanta signoria si tiene in mano!")
The anguish of the Hindu dying childless has its root deeper down in the human heart than the reason he gives for it, the foolish fear lest his funeral rites be not properly performed. No man quite knows what it is to die who leaves a child in the world; children are more than a link with the future—they are the future: the portion of ourselves that belongs not to this day but to to-morrow. To them may be transferred all the hopes sadly laid by, in our own case, as illusions; the "to be" of their young lives can be turned into a beautiful "arrangement in pink," even though experience has taught us that the common lot of humanity is "an Imbroglio in Whity-brown." Most parents do all this and much more; as lullabies would show were there any need for the showing of it. One cradle-song, however, faces the truth that of all sure things the surest is that sorrow and disappointment will fall upon the children as it has fallen upon the fathers. The song comes from Germany; the English version is by Mr C. G. Leland:
Sleep, little darling, an angel art thou!
Sleep, while I'm brushing the flies from your brow.
All is as silent as silent can be;
Close your blue eyes from the daylight and me.
This is the time, love, to sleep and to play;
Later, oh later, is not like to-day,