For one will wake at midnight drear
From out a dream of death,
And find no dear head pillowed near,
No sound of peaceful breath!
May no weak wailing words arise,
No bitter thoughts awake
To see the tears in Memory's eyes:
For Christie's sake!
And There, where many crownless kings
Of earth a crown shall wear,
The martyrs who have borne the pangs
Their palm at last shall bear,—
When with our lily pure of sin
Our heavenward way we take,
There may we walk with welcome in,
For Christie's sake!
THE NURSERY BLARNEY-STONE.
Where is it kept? We have often longed for a sight of that precious bit of aërolite, that talismanic moon-stone and bewildering boulder, to which the lips of all devoted to infantile education must be religiously pressed.
In vain have we searched in the closet, where the headless dolls and tailless horses, the collapsed drum and the torn primer, are put away. We have privately climbed to the summit of the clothes-press, we have surreptitiously invaded the nurse's own private work-basket, lured by disappointing lumps of wax and fragments of rhubarb-root; but we did not find it. We believe in its existence none the less. Real as the coronation-stone of the Scottish kings now in Westminster Abbey, as the Caaba at Mecca, as the loadstone mountain against which dear old Sinbad was wrecked, as the meteor which fell into the State of Connecticut and the volcanic island which rose out of the Straits of Messina, as the rock of Plymouth, or the philosopher's stone,—yet we have sought in vain for it, and only know of it as of the Great Carbuncle, by the light it sheds.
"Pray, my good Sir," ask legions of fond parents, "what do you mean? Is it Dalby's Carminative, Daffy's Elixir, Brown's Syrup of Squills, or White's Magnetic Mixture? Is it of the soothing or the coercing system? a substitute for lollipops or for birch? rock candy or rock the cradle?"
"Look" not "into your heart," responds our Muse, but into your nursery, and write!
We invite a general review of all infantry divisions. We may be, for aught you know, Mrs. Ellis incog., warning the mothers of America, as of yore the Cornelias of England. What is the Nursery Blarney-Stone? You have none in your own airy and southern-exposed first-pair-back, (Nov-Anglicè>, "the keeping-room chamber,") where you daily water and rake your young olive-sprouts? upon your word of honor, Madam, you have not? You never tell nursery-tales of ghosts or fairies; you have conscientiously stripped from the dark closet every vestige of a legend; you have permitted juvenile inspection of the chimney, to prove that Santa Claus could not descend its sooty flue without grievous nigritude of the anticipated doll's frock, and have logically appealed to Miss Bran Beeswax's satin silveriness in proof of the non-existence of the saint beloved of Christmas-tide. Nay, more, you tell us you have actually invited inspection of the overnight process of filling the stockings, (you brute!) and you appropriately label each gift, "From Papa," "From Uncle Edward," "From Sister Kate," "From dear Mamma," lest a figment of the supernatural untruth should linger in the infantile brain. The "Arabian Nights'" (and "Arabian Days'") "Entertainments" are on your Index Expurgatorius. You have banned Bluebeard, and treated Red Ridinghood as no better than the Bonnet Rouge of domestic Jacobinism.
You are a model mother, with whom even the late Mr. Gradgrind might be satisfied. "Truth, crushed to earth" by the whole race of nurses of the good old time, rises again triumphant at your hearth-stone. Then answer us,—Why did you tell your little ones to-night, as the sparrows were making an unusually loquacious preparation for their dormitories, that the little birds were singing their evening hymns, and exhort, thereupon, your unwilling nestlings to a rival performance of the verses of Dr. Watts? You ought to be prepared to explain, also, for the benefit of any sucking Socrates, why it is that these feathered choristers have their "revival seasons," and are terrible backsliders during the moulting period. When you looked out of the nursery-window, into the poultry-yard, and heard the noisy confabulation of the motherly hens and pert pullets, you should be prepared to state upon what theological principles it is that psalmody is not the wont of the Gallinacae. Are the Biddies given over to a reprobate mind, because you don't happen to like their vocalization? Is it only the Piccolomini and Linds of the feathered kingdom who have a right to practise sacred music?
And how about that other stupendous fiction of the harvest-moon? Tell us, since you are voluntarily in the confessional, tell us why you kept back that explanation of its dependence on the Precession of the Equinoxes, which, at Professor Cram's finishing examination, in your school-girl days, you so glibly recited before your admiring papa and mamma? Do you really believe that the solar and stellar system was arranged to accommodate "the reapers reaping early" of the little island of Great Britain?