Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/563



of some high-born, beautiful young lady, well known and admired in her day. A little something at least may be gathered from its symbolism. By the heathen mythological distribution of functions among the poetic Parcæ, or Fates, to the second of these three sisters, to Lachesis, was it given to decide the especial destiny of each mortal the hour that she or he was born. Now in the instance before us a pair of turtle-doves, love's emblem, is conspicuously shown above the head of Lachesis. As this young lady's life-thread slipped through her fingers Lachesis has touched it, quickened it so that the child for whom it is being spun shall have a heart all maidenly, but soft to the impressions of the gentle passion—love. She has been wooed and made a bride, for she has on the married woman's kerchief. That lily-stem with its opening buds and full-blown flowers at top is the emblem of a spotless whiteness, an unstained innocence; the stalk is broken, but the flowers on it are unwithered. What fitter tokens of a bride's unlooked-for death, the very morning of her marriage? But that monkey-emblem of mischief, evil, moral ugliness, and in particular of lubricity—perhaps may mean us to understand the worthlessness of wanton, profligate men. As the harmless unsuspecting hare is easily snared and taken in a toil, so she might have been caught, but may have been spared, by early death, a life of misery. Those loathsome things coming from out the ground warn men that all of us must one day or another become the prey of the grave, and that youth, and innocence, and beauty will be its food.
 * lihood it gives us the history, nay, perhaps affords us the very portraiture