"Our days, alas, our mortal days Are short and wretched too Evil and few the patriarch says And well the patriarch knew." A very common verse, breathing the same strain, is:-- "Fragrant the rose, but it fades in time The violet sweet, but quickly past the Prime White lilies hang their head and soon decay And whiter snow in minutes melts away Such and so with'ring are our early joys Which time or sickness speedily destroys." And the melancholy which pervades the verse on the sampler of Elizabeth Stockwell (Fig. 14) is hardly atoned for by the brilliant hues in which the house is portrayed. [Illustration: PLATE VII.--SAMPLER BY HANNAH DAWE. 17TH CENTURY. _Formerly in the Author's Collection._ This is a much smaller specimen than we are wont to find in "long" Samplers, for it measures only 18 × 7-1/4. It differs also from its fellows in that the petals of the roses in the second and third of the important bands are in relief and superimposed. The rest of the decoration, on the other hand, partakes much more of an outline character than is usual. As a specimen of a seventeenth-century Sampler it leaves little to be desired. It is signed Hannah Dawe.] [Illustration: FIG. 14.--SAMPLER BY ELIZABETH STOCKWELL. 1832. _The late Mr A. Tuer._] The gruesomeness of the grave is forcibly brought to notice in a sampler dated 1736:-- "When this you see, remember me, And keep me in your mind; And be not like the weathercock That turn att every wind. When I am dead, and laid in grave, And all my bones are rotten, By this may I remembered be When I should be forgotten." Ann French put the same sentiment more tersely in the lines:-- "This handy work my friends may have When I am dead and laid in grav." 1766. It is a relief to turn to the quainter and more genuine style of Marg't Burnell's verse taken from Quarles's "Emblems," and dated 1720:-- "Our life is nothing but a winters day, Some only breake their fast, & so away, Others stay dinner, & depart full fed, The deeper age but sups and goes to bed. Hee's most in debt, that lingers out the day, Who dyes betimes, has lesse and lesse to pay." This verse has crossed the Atlantic, and figures on American samplers. But the height of despair was not reached until the early years of the nineteenth century, when "Odes to Passing Bells," and such like, brought death and the grave into constant view before the young and hardened sinner thus:-- ODE TO A PASSING BELL "Hark my gay friend that solemn toll Speaks the departure of a soul 'Tis gone, that's all we know not where, Or how the embody'd soul may fare Only this frail & fleeting breath Preserves me from the jaws of death Soon as it fails at once I'm gone And plung'd into a world not known." _Ann Gould Seller, Hawkchurch_, 1821. Samplers oftentimes fulfilled the rôle of funeral cards, as, for instance, this worked in black:--