THE EVENING OF LIFE. CHAPTER I.-OLD AGE. A MEDITATION. ALL things are passing away, and I with them. How little remains of what I once knew, and how changed is that little which is left. My parents are gone and their generation after them. My brothers, and sisters, and others whom I loved as my own self, are most of them departed, and I am become very lonely in the earth. My schoolfellows, with whom I played in the long summer evenings of youth, and with whom I braved the cold and the storms of winter, are scattered, or dead. This whole district is changed. I have seen the fathers or the grandfathers of my neighbours live in houses now occupied by their heirs and strangers fill the mansions where I was once at home, and knew every doorway and path, as if it were my own. I pass through the churchyard, and as I do so, I leave the graves of my friends upon the right hand and upon the left. I look round in the Church. The old windows and piers and arches are there, but not the old faces. It is like a new land to me, so different are the people. : All those schemes and plans which were once agitated have died with their dying supporters; or have been B carried out and forgotten: and no one thinks who planned this good work, or who laboured for it. All those jealousies and strivings for power, those efforts of men to have their own will and their own way, those vain-glorious attempts at glitter and show are over. They are gone with their actors into the grave. Would that I had not entered into them, and that I had never been wroth, nor striven with my departed fellow men for they, like myself, have to give an account. O my God, have mercy on us all. I myself am changed—no one and nothing is more changed. My body is changed. My eyes are dim, my step feeble. I cannot do what I used to do. I try sometimes, and with a sigh confess that I am not what I was. Why is it that I think no flowers nor fruits so sweet as those of my youth? Partly from love of the past, but partly also because my senses are grown dull. It is as when men travel rapidly, the land seems to move past them, but yet it changes not. It is they that move, and pass, and change.' Thus, not the sweet flowers and fruits have altered, but I am altered. My mind also is changed. I cannot read and understand as once I did. My memory fails. Things trouble me which I once despised. I am changed and changing within and without. My property indeed is not passing away, but I am passing from it. These goods, which I have gathered round me during long years of care and toil; these for which I have neglected my GoD, my neighbour, and my soul; these for which I have sinned must be left behind me; and to whom? Shall I say they will remain with my heirs, and therefore my toil is not thrown away? But how can I tell this? How few sons keep that which their fathers earned; or if the property remains to the second generation, it very 1 Lodoici Granatensis Exerc. |