nsibility that could so soon need a remembrancer of the day. But,
besides, that the majority of people in this world (as being people called
to labour) have no time left for cherishing grief by solitude and
meditation, always it is proper to ask whether the memory of the lost
person were chiefly dependent upon a visual image. No death is usually
half so affecting as the death of a young child from two to five years
old.

But yet for the same reason which makes the grief more exquisite,
generally for such a loss it is likely to be more perishable. Wherever the
image, visually or audibly, of the lost person is more essential to the
life of the grief, there the grief will be more transitory.

Faces begin soon (in Shakspeare's fine expression) to "dislimn:" features
fluctuate: combinations of feature unsettle. Even the expression becomes a
mere idea that you can describe to another, but not an image that you can
reproduce for yourself. Therefore it is that the faces of infants, though
they are divine as flowers in a savanna of Texas, or as the carolling of
birds in a forest, are, like flowers in Texas, and the carolling of birds
in a forest, soon overtaken by the pursuing darkness that swallows up all
things human. All glories of flesh vanish; and this, the glory of
infantine beauty seen in the mirror of the memory, soonest of all. But
when the departed person worked upon yourself by powers that were
intellectual and moral--powers _in_ the flesh, though not _of_ the
flesh--the memorials in your own heart become more steadfast, if less
affecting at the first. Now, in my sister were combined for me both
graces--the graces of childhood, and the graces of expanding thought.
Besides that, as regards merely the _personal_ image, always the smooth
rotundity of baby features must vanish sooner, as being less individual
than the features in a child of eight, touched with a pensive tenderness,
and exalted into a characteristic expression by a premature intellect.

Rarely do things perish from my memory that are worth remembering. Rubbish
dies instantly. Hence it happens that passages in Latin or English poets
which I never could have read but once, (and _that_ thirty years ago,)
often begin to blossom anew when I am lying awake, unable to sleep. I
become a distinguished compositor in the darkness; and, with my aerial
composing-stick, sometimes I "set up" half a page of verses, that would be
found tolerably correct if collated with t