Horae subsecivae / by Dr. John Brown, with an introduction by Austin Dobson.

  • Brown, John, 1810-1882.
Date:
[1907]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Horae subsecivae / by Dr. John Brown, with an introduction by Austin Dobson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    may forget, yet will not I forget thee.’ Indeed, to a man who saw so little of, and said so little to his own children, perhaps it may be because of all this, his sym- pathy for mothers under loss of children, his real suffer- ing for their suffering, not only endeared him to them as their minister, their consoler, and gave him oppor- tunities of dropping in divine and saving truth and comfort, when the heart was full and soft, tender, and at his mercy, but it brought out in his only loss of this kind, the mingled depth, tenderness, and also the per- emptoriness of his nature. In the case of the death of little Maggie—a child the very image of himself in face, lovely and pensive, and yet ready for any fun, with a keenness of affection that perilled everything on being loved, who must cling to some one and be clasped, made for a garden, for the first garden, not for the rough world, the child of his old age—this peculiar meeting of opposites was very marked. She was stricken with sudden illness, malig- nant sore throat; her mother was gone, and so she was to my father as a flower he had the sole keeping of ; and his joy in her wild mirth, his watching her childish moods of sadness, as if a shadow came over her young heaven, were themselves something to watch. Her delicate life made no struggle with disease ; it as it were declined to stay on such conditions. She there- fore sunk at once and without much pain, her soul quick and unclouded, and her little forefinger playing to the last with my father’s silvery curls, her eyes trying in vain to brighten his :— Thou wert a dew-drop which the morn brings forth, Not fitted to be trailed along the soiling earth; But at the touch of wrong, without a strife, Slips in a moment out of life. His distress, his anguish at this stroke, was not only intense, it was in its essence permanent; he went mourning and looking for her all his days ; but after she was dead, that resolved will compacted him in an instant. It was on a Sabbath morning she died, and