And called thee mine, and taught thee sounds and words,
And solved the riddle of thy murmurings,
And stoop’d to catch thee creeping on the ground,
And propp’d thy steps, and ever had my lap
Ready, if drowsy were those little eyes,
To rock them with a lullaby to sleep;
Thy first word was my name, thy fun my smile,
And not a joy of thine but came from me.
There is, too, that epitaph of Martial on the little girl Erotion, closing with the lines which may possibly have been in Gray’s mind when he wrote the discarded verse of his Elegy, Englished thus:—
“Let not the sod too stiffly stretch its girth