eat lover of boys and
young men, speaking to a large company of them:--"full of affections,
full of powers, full of occupation, how naturally might the younger
part of us especially (more naturally than the older) receive the
tidings that there are things to be loved and things to be done which
shall never pass away. We feel strong, we feel active, we feel full of
life; and these feelings do not altogether deceive us, for we shall
live for ever. We see a long prospect before us, for which it is worth
while to work, even with much labour; for we are as yet young, and the
past portion of our lives is but small in comparison of that which
probably remains to us. It is most true! The past years of our life
are absolutely beyond proportion small in comparison with those which
certainly remain to us."

In a very different neighbourhood, here at home, in a remote Sussex
churchyard, you may read that Emerald Uthwart was born on such a [199]
day, "at Chase Lodge, in this parish; and died there," on a day in the
year 18--, aged twenty-six. Think, thereupon, of the years of a very
English existence passed without a lost week in that bloomy English
place, amid its English lawns and flower-beds, its oldish brick and
raftered plaster; you may see it still, not far off, on a clearing of
the wooded hill-side sloping gradually to the sea. But you think
wrong. Emerald Uthwart, in almost unbroken absence from his home,
longed greatly for it, but left it early and came back there only to
die, in disgrace, as he conceived; of which it was he died there,
finding the sense of the place all around him at last, like blessed oil
in one's wounds.

How they shook their musk from them!--those gardens, among which the
youngest son, but not the youngest child, grew up, little considered
till he returned there in those last years. The rippling note of the
birds he distinguished so acutely seemed a part of this tree-less
place, open freely to sun and air, such as rose and carnation loved, in
the midst of the old disafforested chase. Brothers and sisters, all
alike were gardeners, methodically intimate with their flowers. You
need words compact rather of perfume than of colour to describe them,
in nice annual order; terms for perfume, as immediate and definite as
red, purple, and yellow. Flowers there were which seemed to yield
their sweetest in the faint sea-salt, when the loosening wind [200] was
strong from the south-west; some which found