And because the human part of it might not press into the heart and inwards of the palace of its adoption, those full-natured angels tended it by turns in the purlieus of the palace, where were shady groves and rivulets, like this green earth from which it came:  so Love, with Voluntary Humility, waited upon the entertainment of the new-adopted.

And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time is nothing), and still it kept, and is to keep, perpetual childhood, and is the Tutelar Genius of Childhood upon earth, and still goes lame and lovely.

By the banks of the river Pison is seen, lone-sitting by the grave of the terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir loved, a Child; but not the same which I saw in heaven.  A mournful hue overcasts its lineaments; nevertheless, a correspondency is between the child by the grave, and that celestial orphan, whom I saw above; and the dimness of the grief upon the heavenly, is as a shadow or emblem of that which stains the beauty of the terrestrial.  And this correspondency is not to be understood but by dreams.

And in the archives of heaven I had grace to read, how that once the angel Nadir, being exiled from his place for mortal passion, upspringing on the wings of parental love (such power had parental love for a moment to suspend the else-irrevocable law) appeared for a brief instant in his station; and, depositing a wondrous Birth, straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew him no more.  And this charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and lovely—­but Adah sleepeth by the river Pison.

A DEATH-BED

IN A LETTER TO R.H.  ESQ.  OF B——­

I called upon you this morning, and found that you were gone to visit a dying friend.  I had been upon a like errand.  Poor N.R. has lain dying now for almost a week; such is the penalty we pay for having enjoyed through life a strong constitution.  Whether he knew me or not, I know not, or whether he saw me through his poor glazed eyes; but the group I saw about him I shall not forget.  Upon the bed, or about it, were assembled his Wife, their two Daughters, and poor deaf Robert, looking doubly stupified.  There they were, and seemed to have been sitting all the week.  I could only reach out a hand to Mrs. R. Speaking was impossible in that mute chamber.  By this time it must be all over with him.  In him I have a loss the world cannot make up.  He was my friend, and my father’s friend, for all the life that I can remember.  I seem to have made foolish friendships since.  Those are the friendships, which outlast a second generation.  Old as I am getting, in his eyes I was still the child he knew me.  To the last he called me Jemmy.  I have none to call me Jemmy now.  He was the last link that bound me to B——.  You are but of yesterday.  In him I seem to have lost the old plainness of manners and singleness of heart.  Lettered he was not; his reading scarcely exceeded