pangs of old mortality. In that whole crew of the
silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had received a picture; and
he, with his comely, florid countenance, bewigged and habited in
scarlet, and in his day combining fame and popularity, stood forth, like
a taunt, among that company of phantom appellations. It was possible,
then, to leave behind us something more explicit than these severe,
monotonous, and lying epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a
painted picture and what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly
more desirable than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay composed
beneath that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the
housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, the
fame of that bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the sea.

And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for David
Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah's
dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own
nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and
grey tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk
among the tombs of spirits: and it is only in the course of years, and
after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to
see himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own
for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street,
and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the
meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple,
the sweet whiff of chloroform--for there, on the most thoughtless, the
pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a
divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of
man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his
ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go
again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be
still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.
The parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.
Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken
gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of
a moment, and with t