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 letter-writers 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 so-called 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 momentous. Do not all go to one place?
But in the issue, all depends on the using. Happy the few 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.