Mrs. Oliphant, bereaved beyond most mothers, lifts the old heathen adage of comfort for the death of youth into the region of Christian faith. After the death of her last and youngest, she writes of the fantastic thoughts that came unbidden to her mind with a flitting charm of consolation, when all the customary supports had failed: "I know my Cecco in his heart loved good company and was fain to make friends, but was kept back by the reserve of his nature and a shyness to believe in the interest of others in himself. And the other morning it came into my head that he would now have the noblest of company, and would doubt no more of the affection of others, but know as he was known. And this for a little gave me great and sweet consolation, to think of him among some band of the young men like himself whom I have a fond fantastic thought that our Lord draws to Him, because He, too, in His flesh was a young man, and still loves His peers in human age, and gathers them about Him, for some great reason of His own." But youth is an elastic quality, and occasionally from a face furrowed by time and tears the eyes look out as young as ever. St. Peter, of whom tradition has made an old man, was surely of no less youthful a temperament than St. John. There are some, indeed, who seem as if they cannot outgrow the romance and energy of youth, or of whom others can hardly conceive of as old. "For surely," exclaimed Robert Louis Stevenson, and it might have been of himself that he was speaking, "at whatever age it overtakes the man, this is to die young. .. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.” 1 It was but a few weeks before his death at the age of seventy-five that Longfellow wrote "Whom the gods love die young, because they never grow old, though they may live to fourscore years and upwards." "I have meant to die young, and the gods do not love me," confided Stevenson to a correspondent on an apparent improvement in his health. But he died only seven months later, and escaped old age after all. XIII SUNSET "The more of age, the nearer heaven's bliss." So runs the burden of the old man's song in the fifteenth-century poet, Robert Henryson's ballad, “The Praise of Age." The old man sings in a garden, "under a red rosere," and in such cheery notes that it was a joy to hear him. He would not be young again, though it were to be lord and king of all this world. Her glories are but very vanity, and sorrow is the end of all her joys: "I am content that youthhead is ago— The more of age, the nearer heaven's bliss." How many have sung or said the same, of those even whose lives have been fullest of all that goes to make life happy. One of the sweetest singers of modern times, Lady Nairne, has a companion strain to that of Henryson's old man, uttered, as was the early poet's, from the personal standpoint of old age, in her seventy-sixth year. The lines, which were composed to the air of " Aileen Aroon,” have a lilt as of youth and love about them :- "Would you be young again? So would not I One tear to memory given, Life's dark flood forded o'er, Say, would you plunge once more, If you might would you now Wander through thorny wilds, Night's gloomy watches fled, Hope's smiles around us shed, And she discloses the secret of the charm through which Heaven has become home to her loving heart -the passing thither of her husband, of her only son: "Where are they gone, of yore Dear and more dear, though now Where they rejoice to be, There is the land for me ; Come life and light!" It was long before he had reached the age of the venerable Lady Nairne, who passed away, the minstrel strains she sang so sweetly and so well still trembling on her lips, that Southey, whose whole life was more or less a waiting for heaven, in response to a question from Wordsworth as to whether he would wish to live his youth over again, rhymed an emphatic denial. He would not be willing to part with the wisdom so hardly purchased. And as to the future, he is content to bask with careless heart in the sunshine of the present— "When the dark night descends, My weary lids I willingly shall close, How willingly he scarcely, perhaps, foresaw. To the aged, as Lady Nairne so beautifully sets forth, the world beyond is no strange place. Its door has opened so often to admit now one, now another of their friends that the passage has grown familiar to them. Professor Jowett, writing to Lady (then Mrs.) Tennyson to suggest, as a subject for the Laureate's muse, old age, quotes the words of an old lady to himself: "The spirits of my children always seem to hover about me!" Tennyson, his son tells us, had heard the saying before, and it was the germ of his poem, "The Grandmother." It will be remembered how the aged heroine of that poem, hearing of the death of her eldest-born, stays her tears with the reflection, "What time have I to be vext?" "... how can I weep for Willy, he has but gone for an hour,—— Gone for a minute, my son, from this room into the next; I, too, shall go in a minute." The spirits of her dead children are already about her. And she recalls how, when her good man died, though it was "ten years back, or more," she could not weep, her own time seemed so near. "What time have I to be vext?" The state of mind reflected in the words suggests one of the most glorious privileges of age. It is not |