or even gallant Mercutio or love-sick Romeo.  Friar Lawrence, who is a good old man, is perhaps the happiest of all in the dramatis personae—­unless we take the gossiping, garrulous old nurse, with her sunny recollections of maturity and youth.  The great thing is to have the mind well employed, to work whilst it is yet day.  The precise Duke of Wellington, answering every letter with “F.M. presents his compliments;” the wondrous worker Humboldt with his orders of knighthood, stars, and ribbons, lying dusty in his drawer, still contemplating Cosmos, and answering his thirty letters a day—­were both men in exceedingly enviable, happy positions; they had reached the top of the hill, and could look back quietly over the rough road which they had traveled.  We are not all Humboldts or Wellingtons; but we can all be busy and good.  Experience must teach us all a great deal; and if it only teaches us not to fear the future, not to cast a maundering regret over the past, we can be as happy in old age—­ay, and far more so—­than we were in youth.  We are no longer the fools of time and error.  We are leaving by slow degrees the old world; we stand upon the threshold of the new; not without hope, but without fear, in an exceedingly natural position, with nothing strange or dreadful about it; with our domain drawn within a narrow circle, but equal to our power.  Muscular strength, organic instincts, are all gone; but what then?  We do not want them; we are getting ready for the great change, one which is just as necessary as it was to be born; and to a little child perhaps one is not a whit more painful—­perhaps not so painful as the other.  The wheels of Time have brought us to the goal; we are about to rest while others labor, to stay at home while others wander.  We touch at last the mysterious door—­are we to be pitied or to be envied?

    The desert of the life behind,
    Has almost faded from my mind,
    It has so many fair oases
    Which unto me are holy places.

    It seems like consecrated ground,
    Where silence counts for more than sound,
    That way of all my past endeavor
    Which I shall tread no more forever.

    And God I was too blind to see,
    I now, somewhat from blindness free,
    Discern as ever-present glory,
    Who holds all past and future story.

    Eternity is all in all;
    Time, birth and death, ephemeral—­
    Point where a little bird alighted,
    Then fled lest it should be benighted.

* * * * *

LV.

RHYMES AND CHIMES

(ALL BRAND NEW)

SUITABLE FOR AUTOGRAPH ALBUMS.

    As free as fancy and reason,
    And writ for many a season;
    In neither spirit nor letter
    To aught but beauty a debtor.

INTRODUCTORY.