ourselves become parties to the wrong, or the energies with which we resist it. Resisting or not, however, we are doomed to suffer a bitter pang as often as the irrecoverable flight of our time is brought home with keenness to our hearts.

The spectacle of a lady floating over the sea in a boat, and waking suddenly from sleep to find her magnificent rope-of-pearl necklace by some accident detached at one end from its fastenings, the loose string hanging down into the water, and pearl after pearl slipping off forever 10 into the abyss, brings before us the sadness of the case. That particular pearl, which at the very moment is rolling off into the unsearchable deeps, carries its own separate reproach to the lady's heart. But it is more deeply reproachful as the representative of so many others, 15 uncounted pearls, that have already been swallowed up irrecoverably while she was yet sleeping, and of many besides that must follow before any remedy can be applied to what we may call this jewelly hemorrhage.

A constant hemorrhage of the same kind is wasting 20 our jewelly hours. A day has perished from our brief calendar of days, and that we could endure; but this day is no more than the reiteration of many other days, days counted by thousands, that have perished to the same extent and by the same unhappy means-namely, the 25 evil usages of the world made effectual and ratified by our own lâcheté. Bitter is the upbraiding which we seem to hear from a secret monitor: "My friend, you make very free with your days! Pray, how many do you expect to have? What is your rental, as regards the total harvest of days which this life is likely to yield?"

Let us consider. Threescore years and ten produce a total sum of twenty-five thousand five hundred and

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fifty days; to say nothing of some seventeen or eighteen more that will be payable to you as a bonus on account of leap-years. Now, out of this total, one-third must be deducted at a blow for a single item-namely, sleep. Next, on account of illness, of recreation, and the serious occupations spread over the surface of life, it will be little enough to deduct another third. Recollect, also, that twenty years will have gone from the earlier end of your life-namely, above seven thousand days-before you can have obtained any skill of 10 system or definite purpose in the distribution of your time. Lastly, for that single item, which among the Roman armies was indicated by the technical phrase "corpus curare," tendance on the animal necessitiesnamely, eating, drinking, washing, bathing, and exercise 15 -deduct the smallest allowance consistent with propriety, and, upon summing up all these appropriations, you will not find so much as four thousand days left disposable for direct intellectual culture. Four thousand, or forty hundreds, will be a hundred forties; that 20 is, according to the lax Hebrew method of indicating six weeks by the phrase of "forty days," you will have a hundred bills or drafts on Father Time, value six weeks each, as the whole period available for intellectual labor.

A solid block of about eleven and a half years is all that a long life will furnish for the development of what is most august in man's nature. After that the night comes, when no man can work; brain and arm will be alike unserviceable; or if the life should be unusually: extended, the vital powers will be drooping as regards all motions in advance.

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XLVI.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.

BY JOHN KEATS.'

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards' had sunk.
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness-
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad' of the trees,
In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,

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Dance, and Provençal' song, and sunburnt mirth!
Oh for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim!

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

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Where palsy shakes a few sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards. Already with thee! tender is the night,

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And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Clustered around by all her starry fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown 15 Through verdurous glooms and winding, mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows:
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild,
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves,

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.'

Darkling I listen, and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath.

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Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— · To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth,' when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that ofttimes hath

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll" me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades.

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music; do I wake or sleep?

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