The ghost of Pain haunts not that garden-land
    Where Passion’s phantom is so softly laid;
  But Charity beside that earth doth stand,
    Most lovely left of all, thy sister-shade.

  Her baby-loves like trembling snowdrops lean
    Above thy calm hands and thy quiet head,
  When morn is fair, or noonday’s glory keen
    Or the white star-fire glistens on thy bed.

  Her eyes of heaven upon thy slumbers brood,
    Her watch is o’er thy pillow, and her breath
  Tells every breeze that stirs thy solitude
    How thou didst earn that rest on earth called Death,—­

  Earned in such quickening youth and brilliant years! 
    For us too early, not too soon for thee!—­
  So may we rest, when Death shall dry our tears,
    Till everlasting Morning makes us free!

THE UTILITY AND THE FUTILITY OF APHORISMS.

The best aphorisms are pointed expressions of the results of observation, experience, and reflection.  They are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.  They furnish the largest amount of intellectual stimulus and nutriment in the smallest compass.  About every weak point in human nature, or vicious spot in human life, there is deposited a crystallization of warning and protective proverbs.  For instance, with what relishing force such sayings as the following touch the evil resident in indolence and delay!—­“An unemployed mind is the Devil’s workshop”; “The industrious tortoise wins the race from the lagging eagle”; “When God says, To-day, the Devil says, To-morrow.”  In like manner, another cluster of adages depict the certainty of the detection and punishment of crime:—­“Murder will out”; “Justice has feet of wool, but hands of iron”; “God’s mills grind slow, but they grind sure.”  So in relation to every marked exposure of our life, there will be found in the records of the common thought of mankind a set of deprecating aphorisms.

The laconic compactness of these utterances, their constant applicability, the pungent patness with which they hit some fact of experience, principle of human nature, or phenomenon of life, the ease with which their racy sense may be apprehended and remembered, give them a powerful charm for the popular fancy.  Accordingly, a multitude of proverbs are afloat in the writings and in the mouths of every civilized people.  Groups of national proverbs exist in most of the languages of the world, each family of apothegms revealing the chief traits of the people who gave them birth.  In these collective expressions of national mind, we can recognize—­if so incomplete a characterization may be ventured—­the indrawn meditativeness of the Hindu, the fiery imagination of the Arab, the devout and prudential understanding of the Hebrew, the aesthetic subtilty of the Greek, the legal breadth and sensual recklessness of the Roman, the martial frenzy of the Goth, the chivalric and dark pride of the Spaniard, the treacherous blood of the Italian, the mercurial vanity of the Frenchman, the blunt realism of the Englishman.