Beautiful, lovely, She was but given, To blossom in heaven. EXERCISE LXII. THE PURE IN HEART SHALL MEET AGAIN. WILLIAM LEGGETT 1. If yon bright stars, which gem the night, Be each a blissful dwelling sphere, Where kindred spirits re-unite, Whom Death hath torn asunder here,- And leave this blighted orb afar,— 2. But O, how dark, how drear, how lone, If there no more the ties shall twine, 3. It can not be; each hope, each fear, That lights the eye, or clouds the brow, Than this bleak world that holds us now. When heaviest weighs life's galling chair,- www EXERCISE LXIII. LIFE ENDEARED BY AGE. OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 1. Age, that lessens the enjoyment of life, increases our desire of living. Those dangers which, in the vigor of youth, we had learned to despise, assume new terrors as we grow old. Our caution increasing as our years increase, fear becomes at last the prevailing passion of the mind; and the small remainder of life is taken up in useless efforts to keep off our end, or provide for a continued existence. 2. Strange contradiction in our nature, and to which even the wise are liable! If I should judge of that part of life, which lies before me, by that which I have already seen, the prospect is hideous. Experience tells me, that my past enjoyments have brought no real felicity, and sensation assures me, that those I have felt are stronger than those which are yet to come. Yet experience and sensation in vain persuade; hope, more powerful than either, dresses out the distant prospect in fancied beauty; some happiness, in long perspective, still beckons me to pursue, and, like a losing gamester, every new disappointment increases my ardor to continue the game. 3. Whence, my friend, this increased love of life, which grows upon us with our years? whence comes it, that we thus make greater efforts to preserve our existence at a period when it becomes scarcely worth the keeping? Is it that Nature, attentive to the preservation of mankind, increases our wishes to live, while she lessens our enjoyments; and, as she robs the senses of every pleasure, equips imagination in the spoil? 4. Life would be insupportable to an old man who, loaded with infirmities, feared death no more than when in the vigor of manhood; the numberless calamities of decaying nature, and the consciousness of surviving every pleasure, would at once induce him, with his own hand, to terminate the scene of inisery; but, happily, the contempt of death forsakes him at a time, when it could be only prejudicial, and life acquires an imaginary value in proportion as its real value is no more. 5. Our attachment to every object around us increases, in general, from the length of our acquaintance with it. "I would not choose," says a French philosopher, "to see an old post pulled up with which I had been long acquainted." A mind long habituated to a certain set of objects insensibly becomes fond of seeing them; visits them from habit, and parts from them with reluctance. Hence proceeds the avarice of the old in every kind of possession; they love the world and all that it produces; they love life and all its advantages; not because it gives them pleasure, but because they have known it long. 6. Chinvang, the Chaste, ascending the throne of China, commanded that all who were unjustly detained in prison during the preceding reigns should be set free. Among the number who came to thank their deliverer on this occasion, there appeared a majestic old man, who, falling at the emperor's feet, addressed him as follows: "Great father of China, behold a wretch, now eighty-five years old, who was shut up in a dungeon at the age of twenty-two. I was imprisoned, though a stranger to crime, or without being even confronted by my accusers. I have now lived in solitude and in darkness for more than fifty years, and am grown familiar with distress. 7. 66 As yet, dazzled with the splendor of that sun, to which you have restored me, I have been wandering the streets to find some friend that would assist, or relieve, or remember me; but my friends, my family, and relations are all dead, and I am forgotten Permit me, then, O Chinvang, to wear out the wretched remains of life in my former prison; the walls of my dungeon are to me more pleasing than the most splendid palace: I have not long to live, and shall be unhappy except I spend the rest of my days where my youth was passed-in that prison from which you were pleased to release me." 8. The old man's passion for confinement is similar to that we all have for life. We are habituated to the prison, we look round with discontent, are displeased with the abode, and yet the length of our captivity only increases our fondness for the cell. The trees we have planted, the houses we have built, or the posterity we have begotten, all serve to bind us closer to earth, and imbitter our parting. Life sues the young like a new acquaintance; the companion, as yet unexhausted, is at once instructive and amusing; its company pleases, yet, for all this, it is but little regarded. 9. To us, who are declined in years, life appears like an old friend; its jests have been anticipated in former conversation; it has no new story to make us smile, no new improvement with which to surprise. Yet still we love it; destitute of every enjoyment, still we love it; husband the wasting treasure with increased frugality, and feel all the poignancy of anguish in the fatal separation. EXERCISE LXIV. ESTIMATE OF LIFE. WILLIAM HAZLITT. 1. It is little, it is short, it is not worth having—if we take the last hour, and leave out all that has gone before, which has been one way of looking at the subject. Such calculators seem to say, that life is nothing when it is over; and that may, in their sense, be true. If the old rule-Respice finem* -were to be made absolute, and no one could be proounced fortunate till the day of his death, there are few among us whose existence would, upon such conditions, be much to he envied. 2. But this is not a fair view of the case. A man's life is his whole life, not to the last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a little matter, whether * Respice finem-Regard the end. we regard its pleasures or its pains. To draw a peevish conclusion to the contrary, from our own superannuated desires of forgetful indifference, is about as reasonable as to say, a man never was young, because he has grown old, or never lived, because he is now dead. 3. The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend on the few last steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged of from the last stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor the last hour of our existence, but the space that parts these two-not our exit, nor our entrance upon the stage, but what we do feel, and think while there that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it. 4. Indeed, it would be easy to show that it is the very extent of human life, the infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the hours, months, years, spent in one fond pursuit after another; that it is, in a word, the length of our common journey, and the quantity of events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual perception, make it slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in its own perspective. 5. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing! It is a speck in our fancy, and yet what canvas would be big enough to hold its striking groups, its endless objects! It is light as vanity; and yet, if all its weary moments, if all its head and heart-aches were compressed into one, what fortitude would not be overwhelmed with the blow! 6. What a huge heap, a "huge dumb heap," of wishes, thoughts, feelings, anxious cares, soothing hopes, loves, joys, friendships, it is composed of! How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long, deep, and intense, often pass through the mind in one day's thinking or reading, for instance ! 7. How many such days are there in a year, how many years in a long life, still occupied with something interesting -still recalling some old impression-still recurring to some |