ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD. Shall I not mourn thee, darling boy? with whom, Childless I missed not children of my own; I, who first caught and pressed thee to my breast, And called thee mine, and taught thee sounds and words, And solved the riddle of thy murmurings, And stoop’d to catch thee creeping on the ground, And propp’d thy steps, and ever had my lap Ready, if drowsy were those little eyes, To rock them with a lullaby to sleep; Thy first word was my name, thy fun my smile, And not a joy of thine but came from me. There is, too, that epitaph of Martial on the little girl Erotion, closing with the lines which may possibly have been in Gray’s mind when he wrote the discarded verse of his Elegy, Englished thus:— “Let not the sod too stiffly stretch its girth Above those tender limbs, erstwhile so free; Press lightly on her form, dear Mother Earth, Her little footsteps lightly fell on thee.”[15] In the literature which sounds the deeper waters of life, we find references to childhood; but the child rarely, if ever, draws the thought outside of the confines of this world. As near an approach as any to a perception of the mystery of childhood is in a passage in Lucretius, where the poet looks down with compassion upon the new-born infant as one of the mysteries of nature: “Moreover, the babe, like a sailor cast ashore by the cruel waves, lies naked on the ground, speechless, in need of every aid to life when first nature has cast him forth by great throes from his mother’s womb, and he fills the air with his piteous wail, as befits one whose doom it is to pass through so much misery in life.”[16] Lucretius displayed a profound reverence for human affection. Scattered through his great poem are fine lines in which childhood appears. “Soon,” he says, in one mournful passage,—“soon shall thy home receive thee no more with glad welcome, nor thy dear children run to snatch thy first kiss, touching thy heart with silent gladness.”[17] Juvenal, with the thought of youth as the possible restoration of a sinking world, utters a cry, which has often been taken up by sensualists even, when he injects into his pitiless satire the solemn words, “the greatest reverence is due to the boy.”[18]