“Anger is like
A full-hot horse, who being allowed his way,
Self-mettle tires him.”
A TWICE-TOLD TALE OF YEARS.
Ecclesiastes vi. 6.
The preacher, whose text was Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, pictures in one section of his homily a man who has lived many years, “so that the days of his years be many,” but whose soul is not filled with good, but aches rather with a gnawing sense of emptiness, so that his many years, gloomy as they have been, are all too few. “Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?” What more tedious than such a twice-told tale of years? Yet, to look back upon, how fleet their transit, how imperceptible their lapse, how petty the sum of them! That tale is soon told, even if told twice.
The days of our life are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; nor do the fourscore seem longer to the retrospective reviewer than do to the sexagenarian his sixty years, or to the septuagenarian his threescore and ten. The most popular of contemporary authors describes a man of seventy-eight, of whom a loveless, sad-hearted questioner asks whether his seventy-eight years would not be seventy-eight heavy curses, if he could say to himself, as the questioner can, “I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by.” The Royal Preacher would apply context as well as text to such a retrospect, with an “I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known anything: this hath more rest than the other. Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good.”
The same questioner, already cited, asks the same old man if his childhood seems far off,—if the days when he sat at his mother’s knee seem days of very long ago? To which 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.