ght by time, it would be worth looking
at as it passed through the curve of life,--the vital parabola, which
betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An inscription
is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or granite, or
marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and hollows, of a
countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by the aid of a
continuous series of photographs would not only be curious; it would
teach us much more about the laws of physiognomy than we could get from
casual and unconnected observations.

The same kind of interest, without any assumption of merit to be found in
them, I would claim for a series of annual poems, beginning in middle
life and continued to what many of my correspondents are pleased to
remind me--as if I required to have the fact brought to my knowledge--is
no longer youth. Here is the latest of a series of annual poems read
during the last thirty-four years. There seems to have been one
interruption, but there may have been other poems not recorded or
remembered. This, the latest poem of the series, was listened to by the
scanty remnant of what was a large and brilliant circle of classmates and
friends when the first of the long series was read before them, then in
the flush of ardent manhood:--

THE OLD SONG.

The minstrel of the classic lay
Of love and wine who sings
Still found the fingers run astray
That touched the rebel strings.

Of Cadmus he would fair have sung,
Of Atreus and his line;
But all the jocund echoes rung
With songs of love and wine.

Ah, brothers! I would fair have caught
Some fresher fancy's gleam;
My truant accents find, unsought,
The old familiar theme.

Love, Love! but not the sportive child
With shaft and twanging bow,
Whose random arrows drove us wild
Some threescore years ago;

Not Eros, with his joyous laugh,
The urchin blind and bare,
But Love, with spectacles and staff,
And scanty, silvered hair.

Our heads with frosted locks are white,
Our roofs are thatched with snow,
But red, in chilling winter's spite,
Our hearts and hearthstones glow.

Our old acquaintance, Time, drops in,
And while the running sands
Their golden thread unheeded spin,
He warms his frozen hands.

Stay, winged hours, too swift, too sweet,
And waft this message o'er
To all we miss, from all we meet
On life's fast