on the wings of parental love (such power had parental
love for a moment to suspend the else-irrevocable law) appeared for
a brief instant in his station; and, depositing a wondrous Birth,
straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew him no more. And this
charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and lovely--but Adah
sleepeth by the river Pison.

A DEATH-BED

IN A LETTER TO R.H. ESQ. OF B----

I called upon you this morning, and found that you were gone to visit
a dying friend. I had been upon a like errand. Poor N.R. has lain
dying now for almost a week; such is the penalty we pay for having
enjoyed through life a strong constitution. Whether he knew me or not,
I know not, or whether he saw me through his poor glazed eyes; but the
group I saw about him I shall not forget. Upon the bed, or about it,
were assembled his Wife, their two Daughters, and poor deaf Robert,
looking doubly stupified. There they were, and seemed to have been
sitting all the week. I could only reach out a hand to Mrs. R.
Speaking was impossible in that mute chamber. By this time it must be
all over with him. In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. He
was my friend, and my father's friend, for all the life that I can
remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships since. Those are the
friendships, which outlast a second generation. Old as I am getting,
in his eyes I was still the child he knew me. To the last he called
me Jemmy. I have none to call me Jemmy now. He was the last link that
bound me to B----. You are but of yesterday. In him I seem to have
lost the old plainness of manners and singleness of heart. Lettered
he was not; his reading scarcely exceeded the Obituary of the old
Gentleman's Magazine, to which he has never failed of having recourse
for these last fifty years. Yet there was the pride of literature
about him from that slender perusal; and moreover from his office of
archive-keeper to your ancient city, in which he must needs pick up
some equivocal Latin; which, among his less literary friends, assumed
the air of a very pleasant pedantry. Can I forget the erudite look
with which, having tried to puzzle out the text of a Black lettered
Chaucer in your Corporation Library, to which he was a sort of
Librarian, he gave it up with this consolatory reflection--"Jemmy,"
said he, "I do not know what you find in these very old books, but I
observe, there is a deal of very indifferent spelling in them." His
jokes