His face did not reply to my gayety. He asked after my health.
"But you are sitting on a wet, snowy bench. You will take cold."
I paused, for I now for the first time remarked a black crape on his hat.
He perceived my embarrassment and relieved me.
"They are very well, I thank you--they are very well."
"Come," added he, with an effort, after covering his eyes a moment with his hand, "what have we now? Is there _really_ to be a war?"
The southern bird, which, swift in airy speed, Toward ruder regions wings its careless way, Wafts from its plumage oft a floating seed, Unheeded relic of some tropic day.
And lo! a wonder! on the spot beneath The tiny germ asserts its mystic power; With sudden bloom illumes the rugged heath, And bursts at once to fragrance, light, and flower.
All the sad woodland flushes at the sight: The brook, which murmured, sparkles now, and sings: The cowslips watch, with yearning, strange delight, The bird which shed such glories from its wings,
Watching it hover onward free and far; Breathing farewell with restless doubt and pain. What were a heaven with but one only star? Must this be all? Will it not come again?
While the new lily, lonely in her pride, Sighing through silver bells, repeats the strain, Longing for sister blossoms at her side, And whispering soft, Will it not come again?
The year's end is traditionally the season for moralizing and retrospect. _Eheu! fugaces anni_ is a sigh that even the Latin primer teaches us; and though in schoolbook days calling the years fugacious seems absurd, we catch the meaning as they glide away. To schoolboys the man of fifty is immoderately old: thirty marks a milestone on the downhill of life. People whom we looked upon as of great antiquity, in childhood, turn out to have been mere striplings. I saw "old Kent" yesterday after the lapse of thirty years, and protest he was younger than when he rapped sepulchral silence from his resounding desk. "How are you, Quilibet First?" he said, quite in the ancient way; he seemed once more to brandish the ferrule on his awful throne.
Boys always call schoolmasters and sextons "old," irrespective of their years. Clerks in the shop style their employer "the old gentleman" without meaning to impute antiquity. Gray-haired diggers and pounders speak of their overseer as "the old man," even though he be a rosy-cheeked youth of two-and-twenty. Lexicographers should look to this. "Old" evidently means sometimes "having independent authority," and does not necessarily signify either lack of freshness or being stricken in years. Thus Philip Festus Bailey's dictum, that "we live in deeds, not years," is borne out by common parlance, and future Worcesters and Websters must make a note of it.