“The deaths of some, and the marriages of others,” says Cowper, “make a new world of it every thirty years. Within that space of time the majority are displaced, and a new generation has succeeded. Here and there one is permitted to stay longer, that there may not be wanting a few grave Dons like myself to make the observation.”
Man is a self-survivor every year;
Man like a stream is in perpetual flow.
Death's a destroyer of quotidian prey:
My youth, my noontide his, my yesterday;
The bold invader shares the present hour,
Each moment on the former shuts the grave.
While man is growing, life is in decrease,
And cradles rock us nearer to the tomb.
Our birth is nothing but our death begun,
As tapers waste that instant they take fire.2
Yet infinitely short as the term of human life is when compared with time to come, it is not so in relation to time past. An hundred and forty of our own generations carry us back to the Deluge, and nine more of ante-diluvian measure to the Creation,—which to us is the beginning of time; for “time itself is but a novelty, a late and upstart thing in respect of the Ancient of Days.”3 They who remember their grandfather and see their grandchildren, have seen persons belonging to five out of that number; and he who attains the age of threescore has seen two generations pass away. “The created world,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it, and may be after it.” There is no time of life after we become capable of reflection, in which the world to come must not to any considerate mind appear of more importance to us than this;—no time in which we have not a greater stake there. When we reach the threshold of old age all objects of our early affections have gone before us, and in the common course of mortality a great proportion of the later. Not without reason did the wise compilers of our admirable liturgy place next in order after the form of matrimony, the services for the visitation and communion of the sick, and for the burial of the dead.
2 YOUNG.
3 SAMUEL JOHNSON the elder.
I would not impress such considerations too deeply upon the young and happy. Far be it from me to infuse bitters into the cup of hope!
Dum fata sinunt
Vivite læti: properat cursu
Vita citato, volucrique die
Rota præcipitis vertitur anni.
Duræ peragunt pensa sorores,
Nec sua retro fila revolvunt.4
What the Spaniards call desengaño (which our dictionaries render “discovery of deceit, the act of undeceiving, or freeing from error,”—and for which if our language has an equivalent word, it is not in my vocabulary,)—that state of mind in which we understand feelingly the vanity of human wishes, and the instability of earthly joys,—that sad wisdom comes to all in time; but if it came too soon it would unfit us for this world's business and the common intercourse of life. When it comes in due season it fits us for a higher intercourse and for a happier state of existence.
4 SENECA.