ht of our eyes
has been quenched, and our deft fingers have lost their cunning, and the
places that knew us have forgotten our mien and speech and port forever?
Very, very few of us can join in Sir Boyle Roche's blundering sneer at
posterity, and with the hope of immortality mingles a dread of utter
oblivion here. Will it not be consoling, standing close by the graves
which have been prepared for us, to leave the world some little legacy
of wisdom sedulously gleaned from the fields of the fading past,--some
intangible, but honest wealth, the not altogether worthless accumulation
of an humble, but earnest life,--something which may lighten the load of
a sad experience, illuminate the dark hours which as they have come to
all must come to all through all the ages, or at least divert without
debauching the mind of the idler, the trifler, and the macaroni? I
believe this ingenuous feeling to be very far removed from the wheezy
aspirations of windy ignorance, or the spasms for fame which afflict
with colic the bowels, empty and flatulent, of sheer scribblers and
dunces who take a mean advantage of the invention of printing. Let us
be tender of the honest gentlemen who, to quote Cervantes, "aim at
somewhat, but conclude nothing." I cannot smile at the hopes of the boy
Burns,--

"That _he,_ for poor auld Scotland's sake,
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,
Or sing a sang at least."

And while I am in a humor for quotation, I must give you this muscular
verse from Henry More's "Platonic Song of the Soul":--

"Their rotten relics lurk close under ground;
With living weight no sense or sympathy
They have at all; nor hollow thundering sound
Of roaring winds that cold mortality
Can wake, ywrapt in sad Fatality:
To horse's hoof that beats his grassie dore
He answers not: the moon in silency
Doth passe by night, and all bedew him o'er
With her cold, humid rayes; but he feels not Heaven's power."

How we shiver in the icy, midnight moonbeams of the recluse of Christ's
College! How preciously golden seem the links of our universal
brotherhood, when the Fates are waving their dark wings around us, and
menace us with their sundering! I am not sure, my worthy Wagonero, that,
rather than see my own little cord finally cut, I would not consent to
be laughed at by a dozen generations, in the hope that it might happen
to me that the thirteenth, out of sheer weariness at the prolonged
lampooning, might grow pit