Matter-of-fact people will tell you that To-morrow does come, and fix by their stop-watch the instant of its arrival. Nay, they can appeal to the primus inter poetas for poetical verification of their view. Says the Messenger to the Provost, while it is yet dark, on the morning which is appointed to be Claudio’s last, “Good morrow; for, as I take it, it is almost day.” And so with the peers who enter sleepless King Henry’s chamber, at the hour they name:
“Warwick. Many good morrows to your majesty.
K. Hen. Is it good morrow, lords?
War. ’Tis one o’clock, and past.
K. Hen. Why then, good morrow to you all, my lords.”
But, in its own sense, the saying holds good, and is good sense too, that To-morrow never comes. One might take for emblem of its import the touching story told by Southey, of a lady on the point of marriage, whose affianced husband usually travelled by the stage-coach to visit her, and who, going one day to meet him, found instead of her betrothed an old friend, despatched to announce to her his sudden death. She uttered a scream, and piteously exclaimed, “He is dead!” But then all consciousness of the affliction that had befallen her ceased. From that fatal moment she had daily, for fifty years, at the time Dr. Uwins wrote, and “in all seasons, traversed the distance of a few miles, where she expected her future husband to alight from the coach; and every day [adds the doctor, writing in the then present tense] she utters in a plaintive tone, “He is not come yet! I will return to-morrow.” To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow—that to her never was, but always was to be.
Why, and how, To-morrow never comes, might be discussed in a strain of transcendental metaphysics. Mr. Carlyle, in a memorable chapter headed Natural Supernaturalism, expounds in his mystic suggestive way the philosophic thesis, that Time and Space are but creations of God,—with whom as it is a universal Here, so it is an everlasting Now. And as regards Man: is the Past annihilated, or only past? is the Future non-extant, or only future? “The curtains of Yesterday drop down, and the curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both are. Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal.”
It is but a glance the strongest eye can take, in that direction. But even a glance may secure a glimpse of things which filmy, unpurged, downlooking eye hath not seen, nor ear heard—for they seem to involve unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. To-morrow thou hast never seen; to thee it has never come. But it shall come. And it that shall come, will come; and will not tarry. Wait the great teacher, Death. Cras iterabimus æquor: to-morrow we shall be sounding our dim and perilous way across the dark waters of that fathomless sea. If the prospect appals, happy he that can adapt to his own hopes, in serenest confidence, yet eager anticipation,—as he speculates on what a day, and the Better Land, may bring forth: To-morrow, to fresh woods and pastures new.
