“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,