And smile for those, in sternest ordeals proved,
Those lonely hearts, bereft of all they loved.
Lo! by the couch where pain and chill disease
In every vein the ebbing life-blood freeze;
Where youth is taught, by stealing, slow decay,
Life’s closing lesson—in its dawning day;
Where beauty’s rose is withering ere its prime,
Unchanged by sorrow and unsoil’d by time;
There, bending still, with fix’d and sleepless eye,
There, from her child, the mother learns to die;