the experience of threescore and eighteen years gives this reply: "Twenty years back, yes: at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning." But he is not one to feel and say with the French cynic, "Mais enfin la vie se passe, et mourir après s'être amusé ou s'être ennuyé dix ou vingt ans, c'est la même chose." He has not so learned life, and the meaning of life, and its purpose, and its end.

Infinite is the swiftness of time, says Seneca, as seen by those who are looking back at time past. Infinita est velocitas Looked forward to,

temporis, quæ magis apparet respicientibus.

it is another matter altogether. As Cowper has it, when retracing the windings of his way through many years,—

"Short as in retrospect the journey seems,

It seemed not always short; the rugged path,

And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn,

Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length."

But as Cowper elsewhere draws the contrast, in the Latin motto he wrote for the king's clock,

"Quæ lenta accedit, quam velox præterit hora!"

(Slow comes the hour; its passing speed how great !-so Hayley Englished the line.) "Since this new epoch in my life," writes Schleiermacher on a certain occasion, "time seems to fly twice as quickly as before, and I can quite fancy that when Jatte and I are grown old and grey, we shall still feel as if only a few days had gone by." Moore was in his sixtieth year when Lord John Russell talked with him of the speed with which time seems to fly; and Moore records in his Diary the question he put, “If you find it so now, what will you say of it when you are as old as I am?" The "peculiar melancholy" of the answer given is emphasised in the same journal.

Another retrospective reviewer pictures our race as struggling ever onward, toiling up towards some air-built goal never to be attained-while the past crumbles instantly away behind our steps, like the staircase of the Epicurean, as we advance in our progress; and every step, which was of such magnitude

when we passed it, is forgotten in the "collectiveness of retrospection," insomuch that at times a passing thought would compass the events of years.

Few and evil the patriarch declares the days of the years of his pilgrimage to have been, when, in answer to Pharaoh's "How old art thou?" the answer is, A hundred and thirty years. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, said another patriarch, and full of trouble. His days are swifter than a post, they flee away, they see no good. They are passed away as the swift ships; they are swifter than a weaver's shuttle. Festinat enim decurrere velox Flosculus angustæ miseræque brevissima vita Portio. And thus in Juvenal's pregnant phrase, obrepit non intellecta senectus. Or, as with the ageing subject of the Three Warnings,

"Old Time whose haste no mortal spares,
Uncalled, unheeded, unawares,

Brought him on his eightieth year."

We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told. In one of his letters to his old friend Mrs. Hughes, Southey commences a paragraph with the truism, "The last twenty years, to you and me, are but as yesterday ;" and he adds, that if we could but bring ourselves to feel, as truly as we know, that the next twenty years are but as to-morrow, that feeling, with a trust in God's mercy, would be sufficient consolation under all sorrows. Half a year later we find him writing to her in the same strain: "It seems but as yesterday when I look back twenty, thirty, forty, and even more years; the end, therefore, of my mortal term would seem but as to-morrow if it were rightly looked on to. A little while, and we shall be young again, beyond all power of time and change, with those whom we love, and to continue with them for ever and ever." Madame de Sévigné utters her pure French hélas! over the like retrospect of twenty years: "Hélas! est-il possible qu'il y ait vingt-un ans? il me esembleque ce fut l'année passée; mais je juge, par le peu que m'a duré ce temps, ce que me paraîtront les années qui viendront encore." Home, straight home

to every heart comes the homely moral of the bard addressing the busy, curious, thirsty fly he freely welcomed to his cup, and whose little life he compared with his longer yet little own :"Both alike are mine and thine,

Hastening quick to their decline :
Thine's a summer, mine no more,
Though repeated to threescore ;
Threescore summers, when they're gone,

Will appear as short as one."

If for threescore we read fourscore, it would not mar the metre, or the rhyme or reason.

Man is never so deluded as when he dreams of his own duration, says Cowper; and he goes on to cite Jacob's retrospective reviewal of years elapsed: "The answer of the old patriarch to Pharaoh may be adapted by every man at the close of the longest life. 'Few and evil have been the days of the years of my pilgrimage.' Whether we look back from fifty or from twice fifty, the past equally appears a dream; and we can only be said truly to have lived while we have been profitably employed." And as the sovereign lady of French letterwriters has her Hélas! so one of the princes among English letter-writers has his Alas! to utter on this trite topic, “ Alas, then, making the necessary deductions, how short is life!" Though the life be made up of a thousand years twice told, the tale is told so soon, and the teller seems to himself but as a dreamer, and his little life is rounded with a sleep; like as a dream when one awaketh.

The good emperor Marcus Antoninus, one of those whom a broad churchmanship is free and fain to recognise as Seekers after God, is taken to intimate that the difference between a socalled long and a short life is insignificant, in regard of Eternity, when he indites this aphorism, among his Meditations: "When frankincense is thrown upon the altar, one grain usually falls before another; but then the distance of time is of no moment." The moments, so to speak, of difference, are not Do not all go to one place? But in the issue, all depends on the using. Happy the few

momentous.

and evil years of a patriarch, if a patriarch indeed, of a pilgrim going home. Be they few and evil in one sense, or in another very many,—

They will appear like moments when he soars
Beyond those sunbreaks."

DAYBREAK NO SOLACE: NIGHTFALL NO RELIEF. DEUTERONOMY xxviii. 36, 37.

OT the least impressive of the afflictions denounced against a disloyal people, in the book Deuteronomy, is that which should make day and night a fear and a trouble to them; so that in the morning they should say, "Would God it were even!" and at even, "Would God it were morning!" There is at once terrible realism and suggestiveness in words but too familiar to most who have themselves suffered, or watched by the couch of sleepless suffering. Job utters a complaint of wearisome nights as appointed to him; so that when he lay down, he said, "When shall I arise, and the night be gone?" and thus was he full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. Like the Psalmist, he cried in the daytime, but it seemed that God heard not; and in the night season he was not silent, but it seemed as though from above there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded. In such cases, one day telleth another of seeming desolation; and one night certifieth another almost of despair. And the eventide is longed for in broad daylight, if haply, with mere change, it may bring relief. But when it has set in, and eve has saddened into night, there is wearying for daybreak, as possibly the bringer of a boon that, however, it fails to bring. A stanza in one of Shakspeare's poems contains an example to the purpose:—

"Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow,

And time doth weary time with her complaining:
She looks for night, and then she longs for morrow;
And both she thinks too long with her remaining:
Short time seems long in sorrow's sharp sustaining.

Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps ;

And they that watch, see time how slow it creeps."

And thus runs one of Landor's imitations from the Greek, of an address to Hesperus :

"I have beheld thee in the morning hour,

A solitary star, with thankless eyes,
Ungrateful as I am! who bade thee rise

When sleep all night had wandered from my bower."

One of, and not the least fearful of, the curses denounced against Byron's Manfred is, that to him shall Night deny all the quiet of her sky; and the day shall have a sun which shall make him wish it done. Crabbe's Tale of Edward Shore has to tell how, at one stage of that sombre career,—

"Struck by new terrors, from his friends he fled,
And wept his woes upon a restless bed;

Retiring late, at early hour to rise,

With shrunken features, and with bloodshot eyes;

If sleep one moment closed the dismal view,

Fancy her terrors built upon the true;

And night and day had their alternate woes,

That baffled pleasure, and that mocked repose."

The hero of one popular prose fiction describes himself as lying awake night after night, quivering with his great sorrowwishing that the first dull grey of morning would appear at the window; and when it came, longing for night and darkness once more. Of the heroine in another we read that "the terrible 'demon of the bed,' that invests our lightest sorrows with such hopeless and crushing anxiety, reigned triumphant over its gentle victim; and yet, when the daylight crept through her uncurtained windows, she shrunk from it, as though in her broken spirit she preferred to hide her distress in the gloom of night, fearful and unrelieved as was its dark dominion." How sickening, how dark, exclaims Keats, in the fantastic diction of "Endymion," "the dreadful leisure of weary days, made deeper exquisite by a foreknowledge of unslumbrous night!" Mr. Tennyson pictures to us the simple maid Elaine. who went half the night repeating, Must she die?