The roses left their two fair children’s cheeks,
Or came and went like fitful hectic streaks,
As day by day they drooped:  their sunny eyes
Grew lustreless and sad; and yearning cries—­
Such as wring life-drops from a parent’s heart—­
Their lisping tongues now uttered.  The keen dart
Of the unerring archer, Death, had sunk
Deep in their bosoms, and their young blood drunk;
Yet the affection of the children grew,
As its dull, wasting poison wandered through
Their tender breasts; and still they ever lay
With their arms round each other.  On the day
That ushered in the night on which they died,
The boy his mother kissed, and fondly cried,
“Weep not, dear mother!—­mother, do not weep! 
You told me and my sister, death was sleep—­
That the good Saviour, who from heaven came down,
And who for our sake wore a thorny crown—­
You often told us how He came to save
Children like us, and conquered o’er the grave;
And I have read in his blessed book,
How in his hand a little child He took,
And said that such in heaven should greatest be: 
Then, weep not, mother—­do not weep for me;
For if I be angel when I die,
I’ll watch you, mother—­I’ll be ever nigh;
Where’er you go, I’ll hover o’er your head;
Then, though I’m buried, do not think me dead! 
But let my sister’s grave and mine be one,
And lay us by the pretty marble stone,
To which our father dear was wont to go,
And where, in spring, the sweet primroses blow;
Then, weep not, mother!” But she wept the more;
While the sad father his affliction bore
Like one in whom all consciousness was dead,
Save that he wrung his hands and rocked his head,
And murmured oft this short and troubled prayer—­
“O God! look on me, and my children spare!”

XIII.

Their little arms still round each other clung,
When their last sleep death’s shadow o’er them flung! 
And still they slept, and fainter grew their breath—­
Faint and more faint, until their sleep was death. 
Deep, but unmurmured was the mother’s grief,
For in her FAITH she sought and found relief;
Yea, while she mourned a daughter and a son,
She looked to heaven, and cried, “Thy will be done!”
But, oh! the father no such solace found—­
Dark, cheerless anguish wrapt his spirit round;
He was a stranger to the Christian’s hope,
And in bereavement’s hour he sought a prop
On which his pierced and stricken soul might lean;
Yet, as he sought it, doubts would intervene—­
Doubts which for years had clouded o’er his soul—­
Doubts that, with prayers he struggled to control;
For though a grounded faith he ne’er had known,
He was no prayerless man; but he had grown
To thinking manhood from his dreaming youth,
A seeker still—­a seeker after truth!—­
An earnest seeker, but his searching care