Alas! the father now saw his wife racked with anguish, and his children dissolved in tears. He discerned, in the strangling hand of Pain, the pallid form whose convulsed heart now reposes, and whose moistened eyes are now shut and cold; and beside it he recognized the loving companion of his former life fatally bleeding on the thorns of earthly martyrdom. And as sorrow, with glowing iron stylus, graved in the crumbling image life's farewell letter, and as she lost hope, but not yet patience, and as her fading eye desired no further happiness save that of her children, and as these could only share, but not remove, the sleepless nights of their mother, the affectionate father sank down, weeping, and prayed: "Eternal One, suffer her to die! Break the agonized bosom, and give me my friend again, and heal the wounded form at last under the earth. Eternal One, suffer her to die!" And as he prayed, the weary heart here in its martyr-life heard him, and his faithful wife returned forever to his heart. Why weep ye, tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings, should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life, an everlasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars and wounds and the whole body? No, let the Spring scatter his flowers on their cold faces, and dry the tears on yours; and when you think painfully of them, comfort yourselves with saying, "We tenderly loved them, and no one has wounded, save He who now heals them." THE BEAUTY OF DEATH IN THE BLOOM OF YOUTH. In the lives both of men and of women, the period of the deepest happiness will be found to be, not that of childhood, but of youth. The joys of childhood are like the spring flowers,--beautiful, but small; like the tinted forget-me-not,--pretty, but without fragrance. The higher and more brilliant joys of knowledge and the affections are as yet undeveloped; the world of the ideal lies wrapped, as it were, in a dark-green bud.