“Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil
Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich
Bronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a gray hair,
A single one,—I saw it; otherwise
The woman looked immortal.”
It is among the graver of his Recreations that a clerical essayist pictures to himself man or woman, thoughtful, earnest, and pious, sitting down and musing, at the sight of the first gray hairs. Here is the slight shadow, he puts it, of “a certain great event which is to come;” the earliest touch of a chill hand which must prevail at length. “Here is manifest decay: we have begun to die. And no worthy human being will pretend that this is other than a very solemn thought. And we look backward as well as forward: how short a time since we were little children, and kind hands smoothed down the locks now grown scanty and gray.” So in Mrs. Southey’s (Caroline Bowles’) tender, simple verses on the same trite theme:—
“Some there were took fond delight,
Sporting with these tresses bright,
To enring with living gold
Fingers now beneath the mould