nding-sheet and the charnel, as
the heated dancer cools himself on the balcony with the night-air. The
young imagination plays with the idea of death, makes a toy of it, just
as a child plays with edge-tools till once it cuts its fingers. The
most lugubrious poetry is written by very young and tolerably
comfortable persons. When a man's mood becomes really serious he has
little taste for such foolery. The man who has a grave or two in his
heart, does not need to haunt churchyards. The young poet uses death
as an antithesis; and when he shocks his reader by some flippant use of
it in that way, he considers he has written something mightily fine.
In his gloomiest mood he is most insincere, most egotistical, most
pretentious. The older and wiser poet avoids the subject as he does
the memory of pain; or when he does refer to it, he does so in a
reverential manner, and with some sense of its solemnity and of the
magnitude of its issues. It was in that year of revelry, 1814, and
while undressing from balls, that Lord Byron wrote his "Lara," as he
informs us. Disrobing, and haunted, in all probability, by eyes in
whose light he was happy enough, the spoiled young man, who then
affected death-pallors, and wished the world to believe that he felt
his richest wines powdered with the dust of graves,--of which wine,
notwithstanding, he frequently took more than was good for him,--wrote,

"That sleep the loveliest, since it dreams the least."

The sleep referred to being death. This was meant to take away the
reader's breath; and after performing the feat, Byron betook himself to
his pillow with a sense of supreme cleverness. Contrast with this
Shakspeare's far out-looking and thought-heavy lines--lines which,
under the same image, represent death--

"To die--to sleep;--
To sleep! perchance to dream;--ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come!"

And you see at once how a man's notions of death and dying are deepened
by a wider experience. Middle age may fear death quite as little as
youth fears it; but it has learned seriousness, and it has no heart to
poke fun at the lean ribs, or to call it fond names like a lover, or to
stick a primrose in its grinning chaps, and draw a strange pleasure
from the irrelevancy.

The man who has reached thirty, feels at times as if he had come out of
a great battle. Comrade after comrade has fallen; his own life seems
to have been charmed.