How scant and blighted sprung the fruit!”
Alas! alas! young life, and young hopes are not perennials; even in the lofty conservatories and crystal hot-houses of wealth and station they flush into a sickly existence, and then perish like the meanest flower by the wayside. Did it ever strike you how much we are alike in this particular? Every one looking back upon his past life as the shipwrecked merchant looks upon the broad sea that hath swallowed up irretrievable treasures. Do you believe that if one had the power of investing his new created babes with a course of life, that he would say, “Do as I have done—pass through my joys and my afflictions, and in the experience of my experience you will be happy!” Do you believe that any one—even the wisest, the purest, the best could say this? By my faith, I do not! And the great focal-glass of a common destiny brings down prismatic, many-hued humanity to a point hue, as a convex lens gathers and concentrates prism-bundles of light and heat from the broad disk of the sun. Human suffering is the chord universal that swells from the vibration of numberless strings.
“Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy;
This vast and universal theatre
Contains more woful pageants than the scene
Whereon we play—”
But, “Mardi” and forget-me-nots have spoiled three good sheets of foolscap, and I fear that I am too much i’ the sentimental vein; let me therefore conclude with quoting a sweet little piece of philosophy, and lay aside these lender’s books for a period.
“A swallow in the spring
Came to our granary, and ’neath the eaves
Essayed to make a nest, and then did bring