Those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. Their other children grow into manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality; but this one alone is rendered an immortal child; for death has arrested it with its kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.

The passage reflects a consolatory tradition common in nineteenth-century Anglo-American mourning literature: the idea that a child who dies remains forever fixed in memory at the moment of innocence. It contrasts the ordinary course of life—other children aging, changing, and enduring “the changes of mortality”—with the dead infant’s imagined permanence. “Kindly harshness” captures the paradox of bereavement: death is brutal, yet it can be construed as merciful in preserving the child from future suffering and moral compromise. The quote thus frames grief as a form of ongoing parenthood, in which the lost child becomes an “eternal image” that shapes family identity and remembrance.