not (of course) comprehend; but I understood perfectly what was a perpetual absence from my pretty friend. Whether I wept, or raved,or how it was, I know not; but I was taken to visit her. It was a cold day, and the red and brown leaves were plentiful on the trees: and it was afternoon when we arrived at an old-fashioned countryhouse (something better than a farm-house), which stood at some distance from the high road. The sun was near his setting; but the whole of the wide west was illuminated, and threw crimson and scarlet colours on the windows, over which hung a cloud of vine-stalks and changing leaves that dropped by scores on every summons of the blast. There she sate,-in a parlour full of flowers (herself the fairest)-among China roses and glittering ice-plants, and myrtles which no longer blossomed. She was sitting (as I entered) in a large armchair covered with white,-like a faded Flora; and was looking at the sun but she turned her bright and gentle looks on me, and the pink bloom dimpled on her cheek as she smiled and bade me welcome. I have often thought of her since. I look on her, as it seems, even now-through what a waste of years!-I see her cheek, at first like a lily-just tinged, but afterwards deepening into the brightest red, from the agitation perhaps of meeting with visitors. The flowers that were around looked as fragile as herself, summer companions. But the wild Autumn was around her and them, and the Winter himself was coming. He came,-almost before his time, cold and remorseless, and she shrank—and withered-and died. The rose-blooms and the myrtles lived on, a little longer; but the crimson beauty of her cheeks faded for ever. The progress from infancy to boyhood is imperceptible. In that long dawn of the mind we take but little heed. The years pass by us, one by one, little distinguishable from each other. But when the intellectual sun of our life is risen, we take due note of joy and sorrow. Our days grow populous with events; and through our nights bright trains of thought run, illuminating the airy future, and dazzling the days we live in. We have the unalloyed fruition of hope; and the best is that the reality is still to come. I went to a public school when I was between twelve and thirteen years of age, and I carried thither a modest eye and a bashful spirit. I was stored with tales and fictions. I had my share of Latin, had read some history, and a great many novels; and thus equipped I took my seat on the third form at Among the other things which I carried to this place, I forgot to mention a grateful regard for an old relation, a sort of great uncle, who had always treated me with kindness. He used to place me upon his knee, in the winter evenings, and tell me stories of foreign countries,-of Eastern and Western India; of buffaloes and serpents; of the crocodile and the tawny lion, and how he bounded through the jungles; and what the elephant with his almost human faculty could do; and how the shark would follow ships by a strange instinct; and how the whale could spout out his cataracts of water; and a hundred other marvels which I listened to with a greedy ear. He never failed, either in his kindness or his stories ;—at Jeast towards me. He was a weather-beaten man, could shoot, and hunt, and in his youth had doubled the Cape, and traversed the Indian ocean. But he was doomed to die. He had been ill when I last saw him, in the Christmas holidays: yet I little thought that the grave was so near him. I was summoned home, one day, to weep and wear mourning; and I went to the house of his widow, where he lay-dead. Oh what a visit was that! It haunted me for years,-The servant said that he-(what 'he'? was it the dust?)—that he lay in the front drawing-room. I shuddered and stopped; but I was assured that he looked just as though he was asleep. Let no one believe such things. There is nothing so unlike sleep as death. It is a poet's lie. The one is a gracious repose,—a vital calm :—the other is a horrid solemnity, no more like sleep than a mask of plaster; stiff, rigid, white-beyond the whiteness of shrouds or the paleness of stone. All parallels fail. We strain at comparisons in vain. I went up to see my old friend. There was great silence all about, and the stone steps of the staircase sent out unusual echoes. The door was opened,-slowly, as though we should disturb the corpse. The windows were closed, and there were long wax candles burning at the head and at the feet; and over all a white sheet was carefully thrown. The length-the prodigious length that the body seemed to occupy, at once startled me, and I recoiled. But the servant proceeded, and uncovered the head of the coffin. After an effort I looked— Ah! would to God that I had never looked. There he lay, like a stone. His mouth was bound up, and his eyelids had been pressed down, and his nose was pinched as though by famine. The white death was upon him-the rioter, the ruler of graves. And my old friend was swathed in fine linen, and pure crape was cut and crimped about him,—as though to save him from the worm and the sapping earth. 'Twas poor mockery of his humble state;-and yet perhaps it was meant kindly.-Three days after this he was borne away in a hearse, and I let out my grief in tears. -I scarcely know how it is, but the deaths of children seem to me always less premature than those of elder persons. Not that they are in fact so; but it is because they themselves have little or no relation to maturity. Life seems a race which they have yet to run entirely. They have made no progress towards the goal. They are born,nothing further. But it seems hard when a man has toiled high up the steep hill of knowledge, that he should be cast, like Sisyphus, downwards in a moment:-that he who has worn the day and wasted the night in gathering the gold of science, should be-with all his wealth of learning, all his accumulations-made bankrupt at once. What becomes of all the riches of the soul,-the piles and pyramids of precious thoughts which men heap together? Where is Shakspeare's imagination,-Bacon's learning? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney,-the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe ?-Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years!—I am content to believe that the mind of man survives (somewhere or other) his clay. -I was once present at the death of a little child. I will not pain the reader by pourtraying its agonies; but when its breath was goneits life (nothing more than a cloud of smoke!) and it lay like a waxen image before me, I turned my eyes to its moaning mother, and sighed out my few words of comfort. But I am a beggar in grief. I can feel, and sigh, and look kindly, I think; but I have nothing to give. My tongue deserts me. I know the inutility of too soon comforting. I know that I should weep, were I the loser; and I let the tears have their way. Sometimes, a word or two I can muster; a 'Sigh no more !'—and 'Dear lady, do not grieve!—but further, I am mute and useless. To pass from this, to a scene of a darker colour.-It was in W shire that I heard a medical friend tell of a death-bed which he had witnessed. This I did not see, and it does not therefore perhaps strictly come under the title of this paper: but the more especially as the sufferer was almost unknown to me: but let the reader excuse it. The man whom I refer to, was a rich farmer. He was the father of two natural children (females), whom he made do all the drudgery of his house. He was a hard landlord, a bad master, a libertine though a miser, a drunkard, a fighter at fairs and markets; and over his children he used a tyranny which neither tears nor labour could mitigate. But he was stopped in his headlong course. A fierce pain came upon him a fire raged in his vitals. His strong limbs, which no wrestler could twist, and no antagonist lay prostrate, shrank before an unseen foe. Fever encompassed him, and delirium; and in his frightful dreams he called aloud-he shrieked he wept like a child. He prayed for help for ease, for a little respite. It was all in vain. My friend attended this man, and, though used to scenes of death, this terrified even him. He said that the raving of the sufferer was beyond belief, -it was the noise of a great animal, not of man. His eye glared, and he swore perpetually, and said that Satan was in wait for him, and pointed towards a corner of the chamber. When he made an effort, it was like the struggle of the tiger. And then he would listen, and cry that he heard the dull roll of drums, and the stamp of a war-horse, and the sounds of trumpets-calling-calling; and he answered and shrieked that "he was coming."—And he came!...." Parce, precor, precor!" Most of my own friends have died calmly. One wasted away for months and months; and though death came slowly, he came too soon. I was told that Mr. "wished to live." On the very day on which he died he tried to battle with the great king, to stand up against the coldness and faintness which seized upon him. But he died, notwithstanding, and though quietly, reluctantly. Another friend (a female) died easily and in old age, surviving her faculties. third met death smiling. A fourth was buried in Italian earth among flowers and odorous herbs. A fifth-the nearest of all-died gradually, and his children came about him, and were sad; but he was resigned to all fortunes, for he believed in a long "hereafter !". so time passes. So "Labuntur anni: nec pietas moram Afferet, indomitæque morti." A -And -There is something inexpressibly touching in an anecdote which I have heard of a foreign artist. He was an American, and had come hither (he and his young wife) to paint for fame and a subsistence. They were strangers in England: they had to fight against prejudice and poverty; but their affection for each other solaced them under VOL. V. No. 27.-1823. 27 every privation, every frown of Fortune. They could think, at least, "all the way over" the great Atlantic; and their fancy (little cherished here) had leisure to be busy among the friends and scenes which they had left behind. A gentleman, who had not seen them for some time, went one day to the artist's painting-room, and observing him pale and worn, inquired about his health, and afterwards regarding his wife. He answered, only, "She has left me;" and proceeded in a hurried way with his work. She was dead!—and he was left alone to toil, and get money, and mourn. The heart in which he had hoarded all his secrets, all his hopes, was cold; and Fame itself was but a shadow!-And so it is, that all we love must wither,—that we ourselves must wither and die away. "Tis a trite saying: yet a wholesome moral belongs to it. The thread of our life is spun: it is twisted firmly, and looks as it would last for ever. All colours are there,the gaudy yellow and the sanguine red, and black-dark as death; yet is it cut in twain by the shears of Fate almost before we discern the peril. All that has been, and is, and is to come, must die, and the grave will possess all. Already the temple of Death is stored with enormous treasures: But it shall be filled, till its sides shall crack and moulder, and its gaunt king "Death, the skeleton," shall wither, like his prey.— Oh! if the dead may speak, by what rich noises is that solemn temple haunted! What a countless throng of shapes is there,-kings and poets, philosophers and soldiers! What a catalogue might not be reckoned, from the founder of the towers of Belus, to the Persian who encamped in the Babylonian squares,-to Alexander, and Socrates, and Plato,-to Cæsar,-to Alfred! Fair names, too, might be strung upon the list, like pearls or glancing diamonds,-creatures who were once the grace and beauty of the earth, queens and gentle women,— Antigone and Sappho,-Corinna and the mother of the Gracchi,-Portia and Agrippine. And the story might be ended with him, who died an exile on his sea-surrounded rock, the first emperor of France, the king and conqueror of Italy, the Corsican soldier, Napoleon. : -I will here take leave of this melancholy subject. I have touched upon it in a desultory way but it is difficult to reduce our sorrows to system, or to array such recollections as these in the best order. For my own part, I have been content to relate them just as they occurred to me: let the reader submit, for once, to be as easily satisfied as I S. was. PETER PINDARICS. South Down Mutton. Ir men, when in a rage, porrected Before these myrmidons of passion, A sober Cit of Sweeting's Alley, Deem'd a warm man on 'Change, was what For man and wife, when tête à tête Our Cit was somewhat of a glutton, One day a leg arrived from Brighton, The fat and grain, and shape and weight,- "I'll dine at five and ask Jack Wyatt." The cover raised, the meat he eyed With new enjoyment-next the cloth he what-dye-call?-ay-Epidermis.) His guest, observing this disclosure Of temper, threw with great composure Where it arrived with fearful clatter. "Zounds!" cried the Cit-" why, what's the matter?" 66 Nothing whatever," with a quiet Look and accent, answer'd Wyatt: "I hope I haven't unawares Made a mistake; but, when you threw I thought you meant to dine down stairs!" H. |