Death gazed—and left it there. He dared not steal
The signet-ring of heaven!"
The death of such an infant is indeed a sore affliction, and causes the bleeding heart of the parent to cry out, "Whose sorrow is like unto my sorrow!" Unfeeling Death! that thou shouldst thus blight the fair flowers and nip the unfolding buds of promise in the Christian home!
"Death! thou dread looser of the dearest tie,
Was there no aged and no sick one nigh?
No languid wretch who long’d, but long’d in vain,
For thy cold hand to cool his fiery pain?
And was the only victim thou couldst find,
An infant in its mother’s arms reclined?"
Thus it is that death often turns from the sickly to the healthy, from the decrepitude of age to the strong man in his prime, from the miserable wretch who longs for the grave to the smiling babe upon its mother’s breast, and there in those "azure veins which steal like streams along a field of snow," he pours his putrefying breath, and leaves within that mother’s arms nothing but loathsomeness and ruin! It was thus, bereaved parents, that he came within your peaceful home, and threw a cruel mockery over all your visions of delight, over all the joys and hopes and interests of your fireside, personifying their wreck in the cold and ghastly corpse of your child. All that is now left to you is, the memorials around you that once the pride of your heart was there;—