are very affecting and impressive.
It has, however, often been felt by us, that not a few of those one
meets with in the lamentations of whey-faced sentimentalists, are false
or fantastic, and do equal violence to all the seasons, both of the year
and of life. These gentry have been especially silly upon the similitude
of Old Age to Winter. Winter, in external nature, is not the season of
decay. An old tree, for example, in the very _dead_ of winter, as it is
figuratively called, though bare of leaves, is full of life. The sap,
indeed, has sunk down from his bole and branches--down into his toes or
roots. But there it is, ready, in due time, to reascend. Not so with an
old man--the present company always excepted;--his sap is not sunk down
to his toes, but much of it is gone clean out of the system--therefore,
individual natural objects in Winter are not analogically emblematical
of people stricken in years. Far less does the Winter itself of the
year, considered as a season, resemble the old age of life considered as
a season. To what peculiarities, pray, in the character and conduct of
aged gentlemen in general, do rain, sleet, hail, frost, ice, snow,
winds, blasts, storms, hurricanes, and occasional thunder and lightning,
bear analogy? We pause for a reply. Old men's heads, it is true, are
frequently white, though more frequently bald, and their blood is not so
hot as when they were springalds. But though there be no great harm in
likening a sprinkling of white hair on mine ancient's temples to the
appearance of the surface of the earth, flat or mountainous, after a
slight fall of snow--and indeed, in an impassioned state of mind, we
feel a moral beauty in such poetical expression as "sorrow shedding on
the head of youth its untimely snows"--yet the natural propriety of such
an image, so far from justifying the assertion of a general analogy
between Winter and Old Age, proves that the analogies between them are
in fact very few, and felt to be analogies at all, only when touched
upon very seldom, and very slightly, and, for the most part, very
vaguely--the truth being, that they scarcely exist at all in reality,
but have an existence given to them by the power of creative passion,
which often works like genius. Shakespeare knew this well--as he knew
everything else; and, accordingly, he gives us Seven Ages of Life--not
Four Seasons. But how finely does he sometimes, by the mere use of the
names of the Seasons of the Ye