e year!
To die before the snow-drop came, and now the violet's here.

Oh! sweet is the new violet that comes beneath the skies
And sweeter is the young lamb's voice to me that cannot rise;
And sweet is all the land about, and all the flowers that blow;
And sweeter far is death than life to me that long to go.

--Tennyson.

It was a bright, cheerful morning in June. The sinking, feeble
Madeleine had requested her domestics to carry her to the conservatory,
that she might gaze again on the flowers that were soon to blossom
on her grave. Death had lingered in his approach. The gay, the
ambitious, and healthy he had taken all too soon; but for Madeleine,
WHO LONGED TO GO, he tarried. Her little violets had already given
their first fragrant kiss to breezes that passed with no mournful
cadence through the cypresses of the lonely cemetery. Crumbling in
her hand a faded rose, she breathed the thought so beautifully versified
in after-times by the immortal bard of Erin:

So soon may I follow
When friendships decay,
And from love's shining circle
The gems drop away.
When true hearts lie withered
And fond ones are flown,
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?

The sentiment was prophetic: other flowers of affection will be withered
by the vicissitudes of destiny; fond ones will flee, leaving the world
a wilderness for her last hours!

It often happens in the course of life that we are driven by some
inexplicable fatality to suffer those very afflictions we dread the
most. We are told of persons who trembled for a lifetime at the horrid
anticipation of being one day mad; it was the shadow of the judgement
that was creeping on them, which cast them finally amongst the victims
of the lunatic asylum. The suicide is the prophet of his own doom;
the presentiment of death by drowning has but too often ended in a
watery grave. Perhaps where the fibres of the heart are weakest, the
strain brought on them by excited fancy snaps them in the misfortune
that is dreaded; or perhaps some unseen spirit, charged with the decree
of our individual sorrow, casts the dark shadow of his wing over our
thoughts, and communicates the gloomy foreboding of a presentiment.
They dying mother had one of these heart-tearing presentiments, so
frequent and so mysterious in the history of human suffering.

She was