In our delight, too, we love to speak of old Venus and of old Cupid—of old Eve and of old Cleopatra—of old Helen and of old Dalilah; yea, of old Psyche, though her aerial wings are as rainbow bright as the first hour she waved them in the eye of the youthful Sun.
How full of endearment "old boy!"—"old girl!" "Old Christopher North!"—"old Maga!" To our simplest sayings age seems to give a consecration which youth reveres. And why may not our hand, withered somewhat though it be, but yet unpalsied, point out aloft to heedless eyes single light or constellation, or lily by herself or in groups unsuspected along the waysides of our mortal pilgrimage?
Age like ours is even more lovable than venerable; and, thinking on ourselves, were we a young woman, we should assuredly marry an old man. Indeed, no man ought to marry before thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty; and, were it not that life is so short, soon enough at threescore and ten. At seventy you are sager than ever, though scarcely so strong. You and life love each other as well as ever; yet 'tis unpleasant, when sailing on Windermere or Lochlomond with your bride, to observe the Man in the Honeymoon looking at you with a congratulatory grin of condolence, to fear that the old villain will smile over your grave in the Season of Kirns and Harvest Homes, when the fiddle is heard in every farmhouse, and the bagpipes are lowing like cattle on a thousand hills. Fain would he insure his life on the Tipperary Tables. But the enamoured annuitant is haunted with visions of his own Funeral deploying in a long line of chariots—one at the head of all armed with scythes—through the city, into the wide gates of the Greyfriars. Lovely is his bride in white, nor less so his widow in black—more so in grey, portentous of a great change. Sad, too, to the Sage the thought of leaving his first-born as yet unborn—or if born, haply an elfish Creature with a precocious countenance, looking as if he had begun life with borrowing ten years at least from his own father—auld-farrant as a Fairy, and gash as the Last of the Lairds.
Dearly do we love the young—yea, the young of all animals—the young swallows twittering from their straw-built shed—the young lambs bleating on the lea—the young bees, God bless them! on their first flight away off to the heather—the young butterflies, who, born in the morning, will die of old age ere night—the young salmon-fry glorying in the gravel at the first feeling of their fins—the young adders basking, ere they can bite, in the sun, as yet unconscious, like sucking satirists, of their stings—young pigs, pretty dears! all a-squeak with their curled tails after prolific grumphie—young lions and tigers, charming cubs! like very Christian children nuzzling in their nurse's breast—young devils, ere Satan has sent them to Sin, who keeps a fashionable boarding-school in Hades, and sends up into the world above-ground only her finished scholars.
Oh! lad of the lightsome forehead! Thou art smiling at Us; and for the sake of our own Past we enjoy thy Present, and pardon the contumely with which thou silently insultest our thin grey hairs. Just such another "were we at Ravensburg." "Carpe Diem" was then our motto, as now it is yours; "no fear that dinner cool," for we fed then, as you feed now, on flowers and fruits of Eden. We lived then under the reign of the Seven Senses; Imagination was Prime Minister, and Reason, as Lord-Chancellor, had the keeping of the Royal Conscience; and they were kings, not tyrants—we subjects, not slaves. Supercilious as thou art, Puer, art thou as well read in Greek as we were at thy flowering age? Come close that we may whisper in thine ear—while we lean our left shoulder on thine—our right on the Crutch. The time will come when thou wilt be, O Son of the Morning! even like unto the shadow by thy side! Was he not once a mountaineer? If he be a vainglorious boaster, give him the lie, Ben-y-glo and thy brotherhood—ye who so often heard our shouts mixed with the red-deer's belling—tossed back in exultation by Echo, Omnipresent Auditress on youth's golden hills.
Know, all ye Neophytes, that three lovely Sisters often visit the old man's solitude—Memory, Imagination, Hope. It would be hard to say which is the most beautiful. Memory has deep, dark, quiet eyes, and when she closes their light, the long eyelashes lie like shadows on her pensive cheeks, that smile faintly as if the dreamer were half asleep—a visionary slumber, which sometimes the dewdrop melting on the leaf will break, sometimes not the thunder-peal with all its echoes. Imagination is a brighter and bolder Beauty, with large lamping eyes of uncertain colour, as if fluctuating with rainbow light, and with features fine as those which Grecian genius gave to the Muses in the Parian Marble, yet in their daring delicacy defined like the face of Apollo. As for Hope—divinest of the divine—Collins, in one long line of light, has painted the picture of the angel,—
"And Hope enchanted smiled, and waved her golden hair."
All our great prose-writers owe the glory of their power to our great poets. Even Hobbes translated Homer as well—that is as ill—as Thucidydes; the Epic in his prime after eighty; the History in his youth at forty; and it is fearful to dream what the brainful and heartless metaphysician would have been, had he never heard of the Iliad and the Odyssey. What is the greatest of prose-writers in comparison with a great poet? Nay—we shall not be deterred by the fear of self-contradiction (see our "Stroll to Grassmere") from asking who is a great prose-writer? We cannot name one; they all sink in Shakespeare. Campbell finely asks and answers—
"Without the smile from partial beauty won,
Oh! what were man? a world without a sun."
Suppose the world without poetry—how absurd would seem the Sun! Strip the word "phenomena" of its poetical meaning, and forthwith the whole human race, "moving about in worlds realised," would lose their powers of speech. But, thank Heaven! we are Makers all. Inhabiting, we verily believe, a real, and substantial, and palpable outer world, which nevertheless shall one day perish like a scroll, we build our bowers of joy in the Apparent, and lie down to rest in a drapery of Dreams.