| | God takes your babes, and theyoh! think of this Are by creation and redemption His; Christ shed for them His blooda wondrous price; His spirit sweetened each for paradise; There, no destructive canker-worm of sin Can carry on its deadly work within, But pure and perfect in the realms on high, Your flowerets bloom, and they shall never die. 23
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The analogy between earthly and heavenly master is old and familiar: it was a commonplace of medieval and Renaissance ideas of order and degree that God was the ruler of the world, the father was a God to his family, and the monarch was the father of his people: a threefold analogy that could be invoked when speaking of theology, of state, or of domestic politics. This poem, coming at the end of a long tradition, exposes with simplistic clarity the ambivalence of the parallel. It makes a double comparison: first, that a child is like a rose, and because a rose is plucked to serve a higher purpose, shedding its perfume in a gorgeous room, so the child was plucked to adorn God's mansion; and second, that the master who took the rose was behaving like God, whose power is absolute and exercised only for good. Now which element in this analogy explains the other? Do we know about God and therefore use the parallel to understand the human master better, or do we (this is surely the more realistic case) explain our idea of God's authority by invoking the earthly master? But if we do not start by viewing this master as godlike, he might not greatly impress us as a model. Who, after all, owns a garden? In the legal sense, of course, the master does, but there is another sense in which a garden belongs to the person who cultivates it, and a thoughtful owner will remember this and will not (surely) steal up behind his gardener's back to remove the flowers without a word. Either the divine parallel tells us that this master is not high-handed, or the earthly parallel tells us that God is.
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Consolation can be direct or indirect: directly, it addresses the grief of the survivor; indirectly, it looks at the departed and claims that all was for the best, even in the case of a child. Heaven was "benign," in Hemans's poem, to call the child hence, "E'er yet the world could breathe one blight / O'er thy sweet innocence." Hemans's abstract nouns "passion" and "grief'' and the dead metaphor of "blight" in both Hemans's poem and in
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