O! wer’t our fate To imitate Those lights, whose pallidness Argues no inward quietness! Their course is one way bent, Which is the course, there’s no dissent In Heaven’s High Court of Parliament. ❦ [Sidenote: Time.] Every year steals away something from us. In one we lose a relation, in the next a friend; health grows more precarious, and pleasure less alluring, till by degrees the whole little mass of happiness we had been gathering drops from us insensibly, and that grave, which we had once looked on with so much horror, becomes at last our refuge and shelter. ❦ [Sidenote: Selfish to lament.] When fate relentless makes the good man die, Why flows the bitter tear, why heaves the sigh? Short is his passage to the realms of rest, O! then, how selfish ’tis to mourn the blest! Lamented _father_! how few can truly feel The ardent charity, the friendly zeal That strove in thee, through life, with active power: And more--that hope, which cheer’d thy parting hour. To know thee thus, we dry the falling tear, And ill-timed sorrow were unseemly here: The mortal yields to God his parting breath; The Christian’s soul’s great triumph is in death. ❦ Pour ceux qui pensent, il n’y a point de langue étrangère. ❦ _From the Spanish of George de Montemayor._ Here on the cold clear Egla’s breezy side My hand amid her ringlets wont to rove, She proffered now the lock, and now denied, With all the baby playfulness of love. Here the false maid with many an artful tear, Made me each rising thought of doubt discover; And vowed, and wept, till hope had ceased to fear, Ah me! beguiling like a child her lover. One evening, on the river’s pleasant strand, The maid, too well beloved, sat with me, And with her finger traced upon the sand Death for Diana--not inconstancy. And Love beheld us from his secret stand, And marked his triumph, laughing to behold me; To see me trust a writing traced in sand; To see me credit what a woman told me. ❦ [Sidenote: Phrenology.]