DERIDED FOREBODERS.

23

swallow is in Æsop's fable-the swallow that warns the other birds of the nets to be made of the flax sown in the farmer's field, if they haste not to pick up the seed, and destroy it. The swallow is slighted, and the flax appears above ground. Again she warns the feathered tribes of their impending danger, and would have them pluck the plant in the bud; but they neglect her warnings, and the flax grows up into the high stalk. Yet again she urges them to attack it, for even now it is not too late. "But all that she could get was to be ridiculed and despised for a silly pretending prophet." Hence came about the departure of the swallow from the society of unthinking birds, and her abode among the dwellings of men. La Fontaine does not omit to pair her off with Cassandra :--

"Les oisillons, las de l'entendre,

Se mirent à jaser aussi confusément

Que faisaient les Troyens quand la pauvre Cassandre
Ouvrait la bouche seulement."

The moral of the French fabulist is, that

"Nous n'écoutons d'instincts que ceux qui sont les nôtres,

Et ne croyons le mal que quand il est venu."

For only of application to the "simply meek" is Wordsworth's apostrophe to authentic presentiments :—

"When some great change gives boundless scope

To an exulting nation's hope,

Oft, startled and made wise

By your low-breathed interpretings,
The simply-meek foretaste the springs

Of bitter contraries."

Schiller has made Cassandra the subject of a ballad at once stirring and suggestive. Glad hands in Troy prepare the banquet, while her ear is spell-bound in dismay at the mournful steps of gods retreating, to return no more.

"And men my prophet-wail deride!

The solemn sorrow dies in scorn;

And lonely in the waste I hide

The tortured heart that would forewarn.

T came to pass, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were

son, and said to him,

"Behold now, I am old, I know not Because he was old, he knew that So indeed may the youngest.

But

the day of my death." he might die any day. the old have one foot already in the grave, simply because they are old; and they know that the end may come tomorrow, must come soon.

That Isaac was pensively disposed, constitutionally; that he was of a meditative habit even in early life; may be inferred from what is told us of him on the eve of marriage, that he went out to meditate in the field at the eventide.*

*Those who are familiar with the literature of the first Methodists may recall a passage in Whitefield's controversy with Wesley: "I have a garden near at hand, where I go particularly to meet and talk with my God at the cool of every day." The biographer of the Rev. William Grimshaw relates how zealously that rather eccentric pastor "endeavoured to suppress the generally prevailing custom in country places during the summer, of walking in the fields on a Lord's day, in the evening, in companies. He not only," writes his panegyrist, "bore his testimony against it from the pulpit, but reconnoitred the fields in person to detect and reprove the delinquents." For he no more gave them credit for being peripatetic musers in the gloaming, after Isaac's sort, than he would have done in Bosola's case, when that night-bird is asked, in Webster's tragedy, how he comes a-field in the dark, and answers, "I came to say my prayers." The aged Christian convert of Pompeii, in the classical romance of its last days, is more to the purpose: "And now," said he, rising at length, as the sun's last ray died in the west, now, in the cool of twilight, I pursue my way towards the Imperial Rome." "But the night is chill for thine age, my father, and the way is long," etc. night and solitude make the ladder round which angels cluster, and beneath which my spirit can dream of God. The stars are the Scriptures

66

"Kind son,

of Heaven, the tokens of love, and the witnesses of immortality. Night is the pilgrim's day."

OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. 25

Of such a habit we have a type in Jonathan Edwards, whose deepest feelings are naturally expressed when he describes his pleasure in walking "in a solitary place in his father's pasture," and tells us how he often used to "sit and view the moon in continuance," and gaze his fill on the starry hosts, "to behold the sweet glory of God in these things; in the meantime singing forth with a low voice my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer." Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, the Prelude, is somewhere characterized by Mr. Frederick Robertson as a noble work, that had made his eyes fill again and again, not by its pathos, but by its lofty tone and translucent purity; a severe work, worthy of patriarchal times, when men went out into the fields to meditate at eventide, and disciplined their spirits by the pure influences of rock, hill, stream, forest, twilight, and darkness, and that too, as in Isaac's case, on the eve of marriage.

The father of the faithful, in the fulness of his faith in the promise, considered not his body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old. Isaac, his son, did consider his body as well-nigh dead, when he made provision for his son's birthright-considered it as well-nigh dead, for, being old, he knew not the day of his death; and that which decayeth, by waxing old, is ready to vanish away. Jeremy Taylor takes occasion to show, in a funeral sermon, that infancy is as liable to death as old age, and equally exposed to danger, and equally incapable of a remedy; with this only difference, that old age hath diseases incurable by nature, and the diseases of childhood are incurable by art; and both the states are the next heirs of death. This only difference, however, makes all the difference. A Maucroix at fourscore years old may well, and perhaps wisely, say of each day. bestowed upon him by Heaven, that—

"Il n'appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu'à moi,
Et celui de demain n'appartient à personne."

But no such reasoning avails to weaken the force of what

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in one of her letters, calls the "good English proverb," Young people may die, but old must. Gibbon demurs, in a foot-note to his autobiography, to Buffon's conclusion, drawn from our disregard of the possibility of death within the four-and-twenty hours, that a chance which falls below or rises above ten thousand to one, will never affect the hopes or fears of a reasonable man. The fact is true, he admits; but our courage he alleges to be the effect of thoughtlessness, rather than of reflection. If a public lottery were drawn for the choice of an immediate victim, and if our name were inscribed on one of the ten thousand tickets, should we, he asks, be perfectly easy? Among the secondary seeming distinctions that yet so sharply demarcate between youth and age, Elia forcibly dwells on age's jealousy of inroads on its dwindling allotment of time it has fewer sands in its glass to reckon upon, and cannot brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences. "The growing infirmities of age manifest themselves in nothing more strongly than in an inveterate dislike of interruption." While youth was, we had vast reversions in time future; now, "we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to economize in that article. We bleed away our moments now as hardly as our ducats. We cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into by moths." We feel all too feelingly the difference between the monosyllables may and must, in the matter of death, as defined in the adage already cited.

Vividly picturesque is Chaucer's image of Old Age, as indeed so much of his imagery is—“" Eld the hoar, that was in the vauntward, and bare the banner before death." John Locke, in a letter written by him when turned of seventy, professes himself cheerful in his retrospect and prospect, and thus touches on the unknown residuum of his days: "Whether it be a month or a year, or seven years longer, the longest any one out of kindness or compliment can propose to me is so near nothing when considered, and in respect of eternity, that if the sight of death can put an end

OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH.

27

to the comforts of life, it is always near enough, especially to one of my age, to leave no satisfaction in living." The may and the must of the proverb are indirectly discriminated by the bard of Olney in his letter to his cousin on Lady Cowper's death: "She had reached those years that are always found upon the borders of another world.

Your time of life is comparatively of a youthful date. You may think of death as much as you please (you cannot think of it too much), but I hope you will live to think of it many years.”

In arguing that it is length of time that makes attachment, the late Frederick Robertson observed that we become wedded to the sights and sounds of this lovely world more closely as years go on; young men, with nothing deeply rooted, are prodigal of life; it is an adventure to them, rather than a misfortune, to leave their country for ever. But with the old man it is like tearing his own heart from him. “And therefore it is, that when men approach that period of their existence when they must go, there is an instinctive lingering [as when Lot quitted Sodom] over things which they shall never see again. Every time the sun sets, every time the old man sees his children gathering round him, there is a filling of the eye with an emotion which we can understand.” Longfellow likens the shadows of the mind to those of the body in the morning of life they all lie behind us; at noon we trample them under foot; but in the evening they stretch long, broad, and deepening before us.

Are not, then, those of age?

he asks, the sorrows of childhood as dark as Are not the morning shadows of life as deep and broad as those of evening. Yes, is the answer; "but morning shadows soon fade away; while those of evening reach forward into the night, and mingle with the coming darkness."

When Ion in the bloom of youth lets fall the significant. sentence, whether he live or die,-" Die !" exclaims his father, "I am old." But Adrastus is assured,—

"Death is not jealous of thy mild decay,

Which gently wins thee his: exulting Youth