Not with feelings light and vain,
Not with fond, regretful pain,
Look I on the token sent
To declare the day far spent.”
Mr. Thackeray makes his youngish widow, Amelia Osborne, take tranquilly enough this sort of revelation. “In these quiet labours and harmless cares the gentle widow’s life was passing away, a silver hair or two marking the progress of time on her head, and a line deepening ever so little on her fair forehead. She used to smile at these marks of time.” Which accords with her placid temperament. Quite otherwise constituted is Currer Bell’s Madame Beck. “A loud bell rang for morning school. She got up. As she passed a dressing-table with a glass upon it, she looked at her reflected image. One single white hair streaked her nut-brown tresses; she plucked it out with a shudder.” That is an early phase of the decadence of which Mr. Robert Browning graphically depicts a later stage:—
“One day, as the lady saw her youth
Depart, and the silver thread that streaked
Her hair, and, worn by the serpent’s tooth,
The brow so puckered, the chin so peaked—
She wondered who the woman was,