To life new beauty, and with grace adorn
The Christian wife, the mother, sister, friend.”
Uhland’s beautiful epitaph on an infant was once pronounced by a critic in Blackwood to be untranslatable. The following version, attempted many years ago, is perhaps rather a paraphrase than a translation, and yet it follows pretty closely the words as well as the spirit of the original:
Thou art come and gone with footfall low,
A wanderer hastening to depart;
Whither, and whence? we only know
From God thou wast, with God thou art.
Better than this in spirit, by all that makes Christian faith and hope better than vague questioning, and fully equal to it in poetic merit, is the following by F. T. Palgrave:
Pure, sweet and fair, ere thou couldst taste of ill,
God willed it, and thy baby breath was still;