INNOCENCE, 167 
age, which dishonours heroes, can no longer 
touch him ; he is fallen! and the sound of his 
arms echoes over the plain! 
“*Receivedinto the heavenly palace inhabited 
by his ancestors, he drinks with them the cup 
of immortality. Oh! daughter of Oscar, dry 
thy tears of grief; the hero is fallen! he is 
fallen! and the sound of his arms echoes over 
the plain.’ 
“Then, in a softer voice, they said again to 
her, ‘The child who has not seen the light, 
has not known the bitterness of life ; its young 
soul, borne on glittering wings, arrives with the 
diligent Aurora in the palace of day. The souls 
of children, who have, like it, broken the chains 
of life without sorrow, reclining on golden clouds, 
present themselves, and open to it the myste- 
rious portals of Flora’s cabinet. There this 
innocent troop, ignorant of evil, are for ever 
occupied in enclosing, in imperceptible seeds, 
the flowers that blow in each spring; every 
morn they scatter these seeds upon the earth 
with the tears of Aurora; millions of delicate 
hands enclose the rose in its bud, the grain 
of wheat in its folds, the vast branches of the 
oak in a single acorn, and sometimes an entire 
forest in an invisible seed.’ 
““We have seen, oh! Malvina! we have seen 
the infant you regret, reclining on a light 
mist ; it approached us, and has shed on our 
fields a harvest of new flowers, Look, ob 



