THE LAMP AND THE LANTERN.
No. 3.
There is one other character, noticeable for none of those traits which mark the life of Saul; yet of an order to which no one, we think, will be unwilling to pay deserved tribute,—which next claims our attention.
Two men—the one in the prime of manly vigor, the other has passed the ordinary limits of human life—are standing on the banks of the Jordan. The one is arrayed in royal garments, the other in a pastoral garb,—for during many a long year has he led his flocks beside the still waters, and made them to lie down in the green pastures of Gilead.
The snows of four-score years have fallen softly upon his head, and his “brow has grown wrinkled like the brown sea sand from which the tide of life is ebbing.” The friends of his youth are asleep with their fathers; the playmates of his childhood have also been laid in the cold and silent sepulchres of Nebo or Pisgah. With the Poet he exclaims,
“They are all dead now:
I’m old and lonely.”
He is blind.
“Thus with the year
Seasons return. But not to him returns