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OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. 33

In fact, I felt a languor stealing on;

The active arm, the agile hand, were gone;
Small daily actions into habits grew,

And new dislike to forms and fashions new.

I loved my trees in order to dispose;

I numbered peaches, looked how stocks arose;
Told the same story oft-in short, began to prose."

The same is the tone of Colonel Morley's confession in the novel. He owns to beginning to decry the present and laud the past-to read with glasses, to decide from prejudice, to recoil from change, to find sense in twaddle,-to know the value of health from the fear to lose it,-to feel an interest in rheumatism, an awe of bronchitis,-to tell anecdotes, and to wear flannel. Alfred Hagart reverts with a sigh to the time when he thought a man old at thirty: now he strives to think that he is not old at sixty,—having himself slid into the zone of grey hairs and bald pates and portentous paunches; and he strives to make himself as comfortable as he can. "But it won't do. The afternoon may be pleasant enough, but it is nothing like morning." So with Hawthorne in his reflections on how early in the summer comes the prophecy of autumnearlier in some years than others—sometimes even in the first weeks of July. There is a half-acknowledged melancholy, he goes on to say, resembling the feeling prompted by this recognition of the waning year, "when we stand in the perfected vigour of our life, and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers, and that the next work of his never idle fingers must be—to steal them, one by one, away." To apply Wordsworth's lines :

"Summer ebbs ;-each day that follows

Is a reflux from on high,

Tending to the darksome hollows
Where the frosts of winter lie.

"He who governs the creation,

In His providence, assigned

Such a gradual declination

To the life of human kind."

Alexander Pope, who had been, as one of his biogra

D

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OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH.

phers has it, a precocious man and philosopher at sixteen, was, at forty-six, old, querulous, and decaying. "His health failed gradually, and infirmities crept upon him.” His letters from that period onwards lay stress on the power every change of weather had to affect him; on his eyes failing him; on his being by evening, not dead, indeed, but stupid and somnolent, so that at the hours when most people indulge in company he was tired out, found the labours of the day sufficient to weigh him down, and was fain to hide himself in bed, as a bird in his nest, much about the same time. John Foster's letters during the closing year of his fifth decade and the opening ones of his sixth, are largely interfused with allusions to accumulating tokens of old age. Just on the turn of fifty he writes :-"It is sometimes only through the absolute force of dates, that I can believe I have advanced so far toward old age. But (should life be protracted) it will not be long before other mementoes than those of mere chronology will powerfully press upon me. Indeed, in the article of sight (so important especially to a person whose business is among books and writing), I am of late receiving strong admonition every day and hour." Later again: "Now that I have reached my fifty-third year, I am very often admonished and reminded of the decline of life. The mere time is such an admonition;" but he also finds in the breaking, if not broken, health of the last two or three years, a strong and constantly returning reinforcement of it.

The miscellaneous poems of the author of Gebir abound in such expressions as this:

"When we have panted past life's middle space,
And stand and breathe a moment from the race,

These graver thoughts the heaving breast annoy:

'Of all our fields how very few are green!

And ah! what brakes, moors, quagmires, lie between
Tired age and childhood ramping wild with joy.””

Walter Savage Landor had not overpassed by much the half of his long life's course, when he indited the epigram,

A TALE OF TWELVE.

"I, near the back of Life's dim stage,

Feel through the slips the draughts of age.
Fifty good years are gone with youth

The wind is always in the south."

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But, once that five-and-forty's past, how apt the wind is to shift to due east, or east-nor'-east, and stick there!

F

A TALE OF TWELVE.

GENESIS xlii. 13.

'ROM the land of Canaan came Joseph's brethren to Egypt to buy food. Charged to tell Joseph who they were, to clear themselves of the suspicion of being spies come to see the nakedness of the land, "Thy servants are twelve brethren," was the answer of the ten,-"the sons of one man in the land of Canaan; and, behold, the youngest is this day with our father, and one is not.” Benjamin absent, and Joseph dead, or believed to be dead. Yet the tale the ten men tell is a tale of twelve. We be twelve brethren, though one is not. There is a touch of patriarchal simplicity, of the childhood of the world's age, in this tale of twelve. Naturally, one is reminded of a famous ballad of modern times.

The word "death" never enters into the philosophy of Confucius, nor on common occasions is it used by the Chinese, as Barrow tells us. Mr. Dallas affirms that under the eye of heaven there is not a more touching sight than that presented by Oriental artists when they enter the tombs to protest against dissolution. Some of the elder races of the world, as he says, arranged the homes of the dead as if they were homes of the living, with panelled walls and fretted ceilings, elbow chairs, footstools, benches, wine-flagons, drinking-cups, ointment-phials, basins, mirrors, and other furniture. "By painting, by sculpture, by writing, they had the habit, as it were, of chalking in large letters upon their sepulchres, No DEATH." And this he says in immediate reference to that little poem of

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A TALE OF TWELVE.

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Wordsworth's, We are Seven, which is founded on our natural inability to compass the idea of death.

"We are seven," was the persistent answer of the little girl whom Wordsworth met within the area of Goodrich Castle, in the year 1793, when the poet objected to the childish reasoner that two out of the seven in family being, on her own showing, dead and gone, she was out in her arithmetic, and ought to have returned five as the sum total. Eight years old was that little cottage girl, wildly clad, curly-headed, with a rustic, woodland mien, but altogether of a beauty that gladdened the poet who met her on the banks of the Wye; and there was real interest in the question he put to her, How many brothers and sisters had she? "How many? seven in all," she said.

*

Something more than a mere numerical resemblance to which may have been noted, by readers who frequent the byways as well as highways of current literature, in a little poem called The Last of the Family, by a sweet singer, with perhaps no great depth of voice, except that it comes from the heart :

"Maggie was twenty-and-two years old,

Her heart was cheerful and brave and strong;
She'd bright brown eyes that sweet stories told,
And voice as gay as a pleasant song:

Yet Maggie was left in the world alone,
With six dear names on a churchyard stone.

"She often told me about her dead,

With chastened voice but unclouded brow,
As though from some holy book she read,

Whose writer had grown more holy now;
Yet her laugh rang out in our girlish mirth,
As if there was not a grave on earth.

"We parted last on a summer night,
Under a sky like a golden sea,
And as she gazed on the glorious sight,

She softly said, 'What must Heaven be!'
I think that the angels heard the sigh,
For her morning brightened beyond the sky.

"She'd worn her cross as it were a crown,

And lo! a crown did the cross become :
For none to leave in our little town,

Was none to miss in the Heavenly Home-
A perfect household before the Throne,
And seven names on the churchyard stone."

A TALE OF TWELVE.

"And where are they? I pray you tell."
She answered, 'Seven are we ;*
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.

"Two of us in the churchyard lie,

My sister and my brother;
And, in the churchyard cottage, I

Dwell near them with my mother."

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Her numbers are wrong, and her questioner tries to put her right. If two are in the churchyard laid, then is five the right number, not seven. But the little maid persists in the full number; and shape his demur how he may, urge his objections how he can, the poet is met again and again with the assurance, as one who better ought to know, "O master, we are seven.” St. Paul would have said she was right, is the remark of Dr. Boyd, of St. Andrew's, in a sermon on 66 the Family in Heaven and Earth”:—If you had asked the Apostle, how many there were in a Christian family of which five were in this world and two with Him of whom the whole family is named, he would have said, Seven. He would,+ asserts his expositor, have sided with the little girl who, in reckoning up her brothers and sisters, did not forget the dead ones. In the earliest of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, there is a churchyard sketch of a poor curate's large family of little children gathered round their mother's open grave; and the sensations of the infant group are truthfully and tenderly touched upon. Patty, the eldest, is described as the only one of all the children who felt that mamma was in that coffin, and that a new and sadder life had begun for papa and herself: pale and trembling, she clasped his hand more firmly as the coffin went down, and

* How different in tone, accent, and import, though so nearly the same in words, is the strain of Byron's white-haired prisoner of Chillon,——

"We were seven, who now are one,
Six in youth, and one in age."

+"It is quite certain that he thought, that though the dark stream of death parts believers on earth from believers in heaven, it breaks no tie of grace or of nature."-Sunday Afternoons at the Parish Church of St. Andrew's, p. 280.

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