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Home  »  Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical  »  Babe (Death of)

C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Babe (Death of)

  • And thou hast stolen a jewel, Death!
  • Shall light thy dark up like a star.
  • A beacon kindling from afar
  • Our light of love and fainting faith.
  • Gerald Massey.

  • A little soul scarce fledged for earth
  • Takes wing with heaven again for goal,
  • Even while we hailed as fresh from birth
  • A little soul.
  • Swinburne.

  • You scarce could think so small a thing
  • Could leave a loss so large;
  • Her little light such shadow fling
  • From dawn to sunset’s marge.
  • In other springs our life may be
  • In bannered bloom unfurled,
  • But never, never match our wee
  • White Rose of all the world.
  • Gerald Massey.

  • When the baby died,
  • On every side
  • Rose strangers’ voices, hard and harsh and loud.
  • The baby was not wrapped in any shroud.
  • The mother made no sound. Her head was bowed
  • That men’s eyes might not see
  • Her misery.
  • Helen Hunt.

  • He seemed a cherub who had lost his way
  • And wandered hither, so his stay
  • With us was short, and ’twas most meet
  • That he should be no delver in earth’s clod,
  • Nor need to pause and cleanse his feet
  • To stand before his God:
  • O blest word—Evermore!
  • Lowell.

  • When the baby died we said,
  • With a sudden secret dread;
  • “Death be merciful and pass;
  • Leave the other!”—but alas!
  • While we watched he waited there,
  • One foot on the golden stair,
  • One hand beckoning at the gate,
  • Till the home was desolate.
  • Nora Perry.

    Those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. Their other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality; but this one alone is rendered an immortal child; for death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.

    Leigh Hunt.