to every heart comes the homely moral of the bard addressing the busy, curious, thirsty fly he freely welcomed to his cup, and whose little life he compared with his longer yet little own :"Both alike are mine and thine, Hastening quick to their decline: Threescore summers, when they're gone, Will appear as short as one." If for threescore we read fourscore, it would not mar the metre, or the rhyme or reason. Man is never so deluded as when he dreams of his own duration, says Cowper; and he goes on to cite Jacob's retrospective reviewal of years elapsed: "The answer of the old patriarch to Pharaoh may be adapted by every man at the close of the longest life. 'Few and evil have been the days of the years of my pilgrimage.' Whether we look back from fifty or from twice fifty, the past equally appears a dream; and we can only be said truly to have lived while we have been profitably employed." And as the sovereign lady of French letterwriters has her Hélas! so one of the princes among English letter-writers has his Alas! to utter on this trite topic, "Alas, then, making the necessary deductions, how short is life!" Though the life be made up of a thousand years twice told, the tale is told so soon, and the teller seems to himself but as a dreamer, and his little life is rounded with a sleep; like as a dream when one awaketh. The good emperor Marcus Antoninus, one of those whom a broad churchmanship is free and fain to recognise as Seekers after God, is taken to intimate that the difference between a socalled long and a short life is insignificant, in regard of Eternity, when he indites this aphorism, among his Meditations: "When frankincense is thrown upon the altar, one grain usually falls before another; but then the distance of time is of no moment." The moments, so to speak, of difference, are not Do not all go to one place? momentous. But in the issue, all depends on the using. Happy the few and evil years of a patriarch, if a patriarch indeed, of a pilgrim going home. Be they few and evil in one sense, or in another very many,— They will appear like moments when he soars DAYBREAK NO SOLACE: NIGHTFALL NO RELIEF. DEUTERONOMY xxviii. 36, 37. OT the least impressive of the afflictions denounced. against a disloyal people, in the book Deuteronomy, is that which should make day and night a fear and a trouble to them; so that in the morning they should say, "Would God it were even!" and at even, "Would God it were morning!" There is at once terrible realism and suggestiveness in words but too familiar to most who have themselves suffered, or watched by the couch of sleepless suffering. Job utters a complaint of wearisome nights as appointed to him; so that when he lay down, he said, "When shall I arise, and the night be gone?" and thus was he full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. Like the Psalmist, he cried in the daytime, but it seemed that God heard not; and in the night season he was not silent, but it seemed as though from above there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded. In such cases, one day telleth another of seeming desolation; and one night certifieth another almost of despair. And the eventide is longed for in broad daylight, if haply, with mere change, it may bring relief. But when it has set in, and eve has saddened into night, there is wearying for daybreak, as possibly the bringer of a boon that, however, it fails to bring. A stanza in one of Shakspeare's poems contains an example to the purpose :— "Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow, And time doth weary time with her complaining: Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps ; And they that watch, see time how slow it creeps." And thus runs one of Landor's imitations from the Greek, of an address to Hesperus : "I have beheld thee in the morning hour, A solitary star, with thankless eyes, When sleep all night had wandered from my bower." One of, and not the least fearful of, the curses denounced against Byron's Manfred is, that to him shall Night deny all the quiet of her sky; and the day shall have a sun which shall make him wish it done. Crabbe's Tale of Edward Shore has to tell how, at one stage of that sombre career,— "Struck by new terrors, from his friends he fled, Retiring late, at early hour to rise, With shrunken features, and with bloodshot eyes; And night and day had their alternate woes, That baffled pleasure, and that mocked repose." The hero of one popular prose fiction describes himself as lying awake night after night, quivering with his great sorrowwishing that the first dull grey of morning would appear at the window; and when it came, longing for night and darkness once more. Of the heroine in another we read that "the terrible 'demon of the bed,' that invests our lightest sorrows with such hopeless and crushing anxiety, reigned triumphant over its gentle victim; and yet, when the daylight crept through her uncurtained windows, she shrunk from it, as though in her broken spirit she preferred to hide her distress in the gloom of night, fearful and unrelieved as was its dark dominion." How sickening, how dark, exclaims Keats, in the fantastic diction of "Endymion," "the dreadful leisure of weary days, made deeper exquisite by a foreknowledge of unslumbrous night!" Mr. Tennyson pictures to us the simple maid Elaine, who went half the night repeating, Must she die? "And now to right she turned, and now to left, like one of those depicted by Keble Shelley sings of the desire "of the night for the morrow" when expressing the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow. Gray vividly depicts the state of mind of one who starts from short slumbers, and wishes for morning To close his dull eyes when he sees it returning." Of Mrs. Gaskell's Jemima we read, that "the night, the sleepless night, was so crowded and haunted by miserable images, that she longed for day; and when day came, with its stinging realities, she wearied and grew sick for the solitude of night." So with Shenstone's Jessie : "Amid the dreary gloom of night I cry, When will the morn's once pleasing scenes return? Yet what can morn's returning ray supply, But foes that triumph, or but friends that mourn?" BUYER'S BARGAIN AND BOAST. `ONSIDERING what goes to make up a proverb, it would be strange if, in the book of Proverbs, part though it be of holy writ, there should be no touches of the humorous, however restrained and dignified its manifestation. Shrewd insight into character, finding expression in phrases of homely vigour, or tranquil irony, or two-edged sarcasm,-without much of this, what were a book of proverbs? Assuredly the collected proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel, are not careful to eschew a touch of humour when the subject invites, bone of contention,-well, so soft a tongue as that of Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, breaketh the bone. Discussing Lord Aberdeen's settlement of the vexed question of the right of search, in 1843, the historian of Europe observes that never was there a truer maxim than that it requires the consent of two persons to make a quarrel; a soft word, a seasonable explanation, often turns aside wrath, and sometimes prevents the most serious wars that threaten to devastate the world. Æsop Smith says he never knew a downright quarrel yet, where two people were not in the wrong; "drop your battledore, and the shuttlecock will fall. A soft answer turneth away wrath.' No doubt it does, in nine cases out of ten,” -but not quite always, this authority affirms; there being some unreasonable quarrellers, who will batter the peacemaker when he drops his battledore. But as a rule, and on the authority of an older and still more widely recognised maker of proverbs, the mere fact of yielding pacifieth great offences. The historian of the conquest of Peru tells us how Gasca was assailed by reproaches and invectives which, however, had no power to disturb his equanimity; he patiently listened, and replied to all in the mild tone of expostulation best calculated to turn away wrath. "By this victory over himself," says Garcilasso, "he acquired more real glory, than by all his victories over his foes." As Spenser has it,- "Words well-disposed Have secret power t' appease inflamèd rage." Sir Matthew Hale's celebrated letter of advice includes this counsel, if a person be passionate, and give you ill language, rather to pity him than be moved to anger. We shall find, the pious judge asserts, that silence, or very gentle words, are the most exquisite revenge for reproaches; they will either cure the distemper in the angry man, and make him sorry for his passion, or they will be a severe reproof and punishment to him. But at any rate," adds Sir Matthew, "they will preserve your innocence, give you the deserved reputation of wisdom and moderation, and keep up the serenity and composure |