Happy the man whose only care
A few paternal achings are.
Gentle reader of the Benedictine order! I presume not to anticipate the pleasure thou wilt derive from contemplating thyself engaged in a domestic exercise, suited to the occasion,—pacing thy bed-room at “the heavy middle of the night,” holding the little “innocent”
Fondly lock’d in duty’s arms;
its dear eyes provokingly open to the light of the chamber-lantern; thine own closed by drowsiness, yet kept unsealed by affection; thy lips arranged for the piano of carminative sounds—“quivering to the young-eyed cherubim”—
Oh! slumber my darling
Thy sire is a knight—
—thy “darling” ceasing its “sweet voice,” to offer more decisively by its looks, “I would out-night you.” Brother Benedict! there is an engraving of thee, and thine, in the book I speak of, mottoed, “Son of the sleepless!”
Let me extract another [cut], seemingly a portrait of the alarming “hope of the family,” after thou hast for some few years tried, perchance, “the Locke system; which, after all,” according to Mr. Hood, “is but a canal system for raising the babe-mind to unnatural levels”—
“My son, sir.”