Be sweetened, and tempered, and gladdened by the wholesome spirit of Romance.

Bost thou live, man, dost thou live,—or only breathe and labour?

Art thou free, or enslaved to a routine, the daily machinery of habit?

For one man is quickened into Life, where thousands exist as in a torpor,

Feeding, toiling, sleeping, an insensate weary

round:

The plough, or the ledger, or the trade, with animal cares and indolence,

Make the mass of vital years a heavy lump unleavened.

Drowsily lie down in thy dullness, fettered with the irons of circumstance,

Thou wilt not wake to think and feel a minute in a

month.

The epitome of common life is seen in the common

epitaph,

Born on such a day, and dead on such another, with an interval of threescore years.

For time hath been wasted on the senses, to the

hourly diminishing of spirit;

Lean is the soul and pineth, in the midst of abundance for the body:

He forgat the worlds to which he tended, and a creature's true nobility,

Nor wished that hope and wholesome fear should stir him from his hardened satisfaction.

And this is death in life; to be sunk beneath the waters of the Actual,

Without one feebly-struggling sense of an airier spiritual realm:

Affection, fancy, feeling-dead; imagination, conscience, faith,

All wilfully expunged, till they leave the man mere

carcass.

See thou livest, whiles thou art for heart must live,

and soul,

But care and sloth and sin and self, combine to kill

that life.

A man will grow to an automaton, an appendage to the counter or the desk,

If mind and spirit be not roused to raise the plodding groveller.

Then praise God for sabbaths, for books, and dreams, and pains,

For the recreative face of nature, and the kindling charities of home;

And remember, thou that labourest,-thy leisure is

not loss,

If it help to expose and undermine that solid falsehood, the Material.

Life is a strange avenue of various trees and

flowers;

Lightsome at commencement, but darkening to its end in a distant massy portal.

It beginneth as a little path, edged with the violet and primrose,

A little path of lawny grass, and soft to tiny feet: Soon, spring thistles in the way, those early griefs of school,

And fruit-trees ranged on either hand show holiday

delights:

Anon, the rose and the mimosa hint at sensitive

affection,

And vipers hide among the grass, and briars are woven in the hedges:

Shortly, staked along in order, stand the slender sap

lings,

While hollow hemlock and tall ferns fill the frequent interval:

So advancing, quaintly mixed, majestic line the

way

Sturdy oaks, and vigorous elms, the beech and forest-pine :

And here the road is rough with rocks, wide, and scant of herbage,

The sun is hot in heaven, and the ground is cleft and parched :

And many-times a hollow trunk, decayed, or lightningscathed,

Or in its deadly solitude, the melancholy upas :

But soon, with closer ranks, are set the sentinel

trees,

And darker shadows hover amongst Autumn's mellow tints;

Ever and anon, a holly,-junipers, and cypresses, and

yews;

The soil is damp; the air is chill; night cometh on

apace:

Speed to the portal, traveller,-lo, there is a moon, With smiling light to guide thee safely through the dreadful shade :

Hark, that hollow knock,-behold, the warder

openeth,

The gate is gaping, and for thee;-those are the jaws of Death!

169

Of Death.

Keep silence, daughter of frivolity,-for Death is in

that chamber!

Startle not with echoing sound the strangely solemn

peace.

Death is here in spirit, watcher of a marble

corpse,

That eye is fixed, that heart is still,-how dreadful in its stillness!

Death, new tenant of the house, pervadeth all the

fabric;

He waiteth at the head, and he standeth at the feet, and hideth in the caverns of the breast: Death, subtle leech, hath anatomized soul from body,

Dissecting well in every nerve its spirit from its

substance :

Death, rigid lord, hath claimed the heriot clay,

I