A great French moralist, in his exposition of the sublime intensity of a father’s love, goes on to say of the tie, the lien, which unites devoted parent to endeared child, “Et la nature brise ce lien. Elle jette au tombeau cette vie qui commence, et condamne le père à rester vivant.” A tender poet of our day was writing from such an experience—not in his case an isolated one—when bewailing the gem of his hearth, his household pride, who, could love have saved from death, would have found a father’s love, and a mother’s, stronger than death:
“Humbly we bow to Fate’s decree;
Yet had we hoped that Time should see
Thee mourn for us, not us for thee.”
Les funérailles des fils, says another French author, sont toujours contre la nature quand les parents y assistant. How often Edmund Burke harps on that tremulously vibrating string, in reference to the master-grief which overshadowed his closing period of life! In a letter to Dr. Lawrence, he expresses his thankfulness to God for dismissing him “so gently from life,” and being sent, he adds, “to follow those who in course ought to have followed me.” In his famous letter to the Duke of Bedford, the bereaved old man utters the lament: “I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity, are in the place of ancestors.” Shakspeare had anticipated the thought, and the expression of the thought, when he made old Lucretius exclaim:
“If in the child the father’s image lies,
Where shall I live, now Lucrece is unlived?
Thou wast not to this end from me derived.
If children predecease progenitors,
We are their offspring, and they none of ours.”