"Oh! Isa, pain did visit me, I wished your graceful form to view, I now continue so to do, She went to bed apparently well, awoke in the middle of the night with the old cry of woe to a mother's heart, My head, my head!' Three days of the dire malady, water in the head,' followed, and the end came." Soft, silken primrose, fading timelessly. It is needless, it is impossible, to add anything to this: the fervor, the sweetness, the flush of poetic ecstasy, the lovely and glowing eye, the perfect nature of that bright and warm intelligence, that darling child,- Lady Nairne's words, and the old tune, stealing up from the depths of the human heart, deep calling unto deep, gentle and strong like the waves of the great sea hushing themselves to sleep in the dark; - the words. of Burns touching the kindred chord, her last numbers "wildly sweet" traced, with thin and eager fingers, already touched by the last enemy and friend, - moriens canit, and that love which is so soon to be her everlasting light, is her song's burden to the end, She set as sets the morning star, which goes NEW-BORN DEATH. BY DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. TO-DAY Death seems to me an infant child, If haply so my weary heart might be How long, O Death? And shall thy feet depart What time with thee indeed I reach the strand DEATH OF BARNIER. BY E. AND J. DE GONCOURT. (From "Sister Philomène": translated by Laura Ensor.) [EDMOND and JULES HUOT DE GONCOURT: French artists and men of letters. Edmond was born at Nancy, May 26, 1822; died July 16, 1896; Jules was born at Paris, December 17, 1830; died June 20, 1870. They began active life as artists, and in 1850 commenced a literary partnership. A series of monographs on art and the stage first gave them repute in 1851-1852. They wrote always in collaboration, kept a journal together, and lived almost as one man until Jules' death; after which Edmond continued to publish novels of the same high degree of excellence as those written with his brother. Among their works, historical and fictitious, are: "Gavarni " (1873), "L'Art au XVIIIe Siècle" (1874), "Watteau" (1876), “Prud'hon" (1877), "Les Hommes de Lettres" (1860), "Sœur Philomène" (1861), “Renée Mauperin" (1864), “Germinie Lacerteux (1865), "Manette Salomon" (1867), and "Madame Gervaisais" (1869). Jules wrote "La Fille Élisa" (1878), "La Faustin" (1882), and "Idées et Sensations" (1866). The "Journal des Goncourt" was published in six volumes, 1888-1892.] WHEN in the hospital the patient- man or woman is not a brutish creature, a kind of animal whom poverty has hard ened and filled with enmity; when he shows some of the feelings of human nature, and under the hand that tends him reveals some moral sentiments; when his heart has received even the slightest education, he at once finds the doctors and students full of kindly attention. The Sisters, too, obey the irresistible law of sympathy. They are involuntarily attracted where their tenderness will meet with the best reward, and where also they may hope, in their pious zeal, to find the greatest facility in propagating their religious ideas, and sowing thoughts of God in a soul. This affection for grateful and favorite patients sustained Sister Philomène's courage; it made her strong and patient. Often she reproached herself for it; she fancied, in her hours of stern self-examination, that her preferences were unjust; but as she felt no remorse, she concluded that God did not demand this sacrifice of her. Was not her whole life made up of those affections created by her self-devotion, formed by the bedside of the patients, and too often broken by death-abrupt separations that made her so sad? Was it not all her consolation, her love for these women whom she saw, after many long days and much suffering, start off one morning with the joyousness of renewed health, turn the handle of the door, and disappear, leaving with her a feeling of intense happiness, but also the pang of parting? Amongst her patients Sister Philomène had a young woman whom they had at first hoped to cure, and whose life was now despaired of. In her speech and attitude this woman -entered on the books as a seamstress, and who never spoke of her past betrayed early traces of education, of fortune, and of a once happy life. A catastrophe could be suspected one of those misfortunes that oblige unaccustomed hands to work. The emotion of her thanks, her deep and subdued despair, and her resignation had interested every one, the surgeon, the students, and the other patients. Every day-taking advantage of the permission granted to the patients' sons and daughters, a little boy, whom they soon found out lived in a common lodging house in the Rue de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, came and sat by the poor woman's bedside, and called her mother. He was dressed in the old clothes of a better class, which he seemed to have grown up in, and grown out of. He sat on a tall chair, dangling his legs, with the unhappy expression of a child longing to cry, looking at his mother, who, too weak to talk to him, devoured him with her eyes for a full hour, and then dismissed him. Sister Philomène took a fancy to the child; every day she had some fruit or tidbit put aside for him as a surprise. She led him by the hand to her little room, and there talked to him, showed him religious picture books, or gave him a pencil and, seating him at her desk, let him scribble on blank tickets. Sometimes she would wash his face, part his hair, and bring him back clean and tidily combed to the sick bed of his mother, who blessed her with a look such as she would have bestowed on the Holy Virgin if she had appeared to her holding her son's hand. The woman was fading away. One day the child was seated by her side on a chair. He gazed at her almost terrified, seeking in vain his mother in the face he no longer recognized. The Sister tried in vain to amuse and coax him. At the foot of the bed Barnier was putting mustard plasters on the patient's legs. And the woman, turned toward the Sister, was saying in the slow, low, penetrating voice of one about to die: "No, Sister, it is not. . . dying . . . that frightens me. I am ready. . . if it were only I. . . but he, my Sister." And she glanced at the child. "When I shall be no longer there what will become of him?" so young a child "Come, come," said Sister Philomène, "you are going to we shall cure you, shall we not, Monsieur recover Barnier?" "Certainly ... we shall cure you, . . ." replied the house surgeon, slowly and with difficulty bringing out his words. "Oh!" said the sick woman, with a broken-hearted smile, and half-closed eyes. "You cannot understand, Sister, . a poor child left all alone in the world. . . . He had but me. "As a Christian, you cannot doubt God's goodness and mercy. He will not abandon your child. . And from Sister Philomène's lips rose an exhortation, which became a prayer, and seemed to lift up and stretch wings out to God, over the bed of the dying woman and the poor little unhappy orphan. When the Sister had finished, the patient remained silent for a time, and then she sighed :— "Yes, Sister, I know . . . but to leave him . . . without knowing; if I were only sure he would have food . . . bread even.. if I only were certain he would have bread every day!" And the tears streamed from her eyes half dimmed by death. Barnier, after putting on the mustard plasters, had remained motionless at the bedside, turning his back on the woman; his hands behind him played nervously with the iron post of the bedstead, when suddenly, carried away by one of those impulses that sometimes seize hold of the strongest, he turned round, and in a short, abrupt voice said to the dying woman:"Well, if that is all you want, you may make your mind. I have a kind old mother who lives in the country. She says the house seems too big now I have left. It is an easy matter; your boy will keep her company. And I can answer for it, she does not make children unhappy." "Oh!" said the woman, who seemed to revive for a moment. "God will reward you!" easy. And she drew the child toward her in an ardent embrace, as though she wished, before giving him up to another woman, to fill his memory with his mother's last kiss. "Yes," repeated the Sister, looking at the surgeon - "yes, indeed, God will reward you." Sometimes the surgeon was in a teasing mood. On such days he amused himself by tormenting Sister Philomène on religion. He would argue, philosophize, dispute with mischievous persistency, but yet handle his subject with as light a touch as that with which a well-mannered man makes fun of the tastes of a young girl he honors, or the convictions of a woman he respects. He would press the Sister, worry her by jesting in order to make her speak and reply to him. He would have liked to make her impatient; but the Sister understood his maneuvers and guessed his intention from the smile that he could not conceal. She would allow him to talk, look at him, and then laugh. The surgeon, with his most serious air, would renew his arguments, seeking for those that might most embarrass the Sister; trying, for example, to prove to her by scientific reasons the impossibility of such and such a miracle. The Sister, undisturbed, replied by evading the question with a jest, a sally of natural mother wit and honest common sense, by one of those simple and happy phrases that faith puts into the mouths of the ignorant and the simple. One day, pushed to the far end, Barnier said to her : |