cometh on?
The burgeoning, the cruel flowering;
At night the quickening splash of rain, at dawn
That muffled call of babes how like to birds;
And I amid these sights and sounds must starve
I with so much to give perish of thrift!
Omitted by His casual dew!

GIOVANNI.
Well, well,
You are spared much; children can wring the heart.

LUCREZIA.
Spared! to be spared what was I born to have,
I am a woman, and this very flesh
Demands its natural pangs, its rightful throes,
And I implore with vehemence these pains.
I know that children wound us, and surprise
Even to utter death, till we at last
Turn from a face to flowers; but this my heart
Was ready for these pangs, and had foreseen
Oh! but I grudge the mother her last look
Upon the coffined form--that pang is rich--
Envy the shivering cry when gravel falls
And all these maimed wants and thwarted thoughts,
Eternal yearning, answered by the wind,
Have dried in me belief and love and fear.
I am become a danger and a menace,
A wandering fire, a disappointed force,
A peril--do you hear, Giovanni? Oh,
It is such souls as mine that go to swell
The childless cavern cry of the barren sea,
Or make that human ending to night wind.

In Mrs. Charles Herne, this feeling was not quite as strong as that
expressed in the play, but after they had been married two years, she
did some quiet thinking in that line. She would sit alone at times, and
let her imagination be active in the thought, what delight it would give
her if when her husband came in the room where she was, she could take
him over to a little crib and turn back the corner of a fancy worked
cover and show him such a sweet, wee, little face nestled on the pillow,
and what joy it would give her, when her husband came in from his work
to put a little one into his arms and see how delighted he would be to
take the child, and then see him sit down and hear him use language
which belongs to baby talk. Again she thought what pleasure it would
give her to start a little toddling form down the pathway to meet her
husband, and to see the little one stand still when it met its father,
and raise