V.

  We sailed for the moon, but, in sad disillusion,
    Snug under Point Comfort are glad to make fast,
  And strive (sans our glasses) to make a confusion
    ’Twixt our rind of green cheese and the moon of the past;
  Ah, Might-have-been, Could-have-been, Would-have-been! rascals,
    He’s a genius or fool whom ye cheat at two-score,
  And the man whose boy-promise was likened to Pascal’s
    Is thankful at forty they don’t call him bore!

  VI.

  With what fumes of fame was each confident pate full! 
    How rates of insurance should rise on the Charles! 
  And which of us now would not feel wisely grateful,
    If his rhymes sold as fast as the Emblems of Quarles? 
  E’en if won, what’s the good of Life’s medals and prizes? 
    The rapture’s in what never was or is gone;
  That we missed them makes Helens of plain Ann Elizys,
  For the goose of To-day still is Memory’s swan.

  VII.

  And yet who would change the old dream for new treasure? 
    Make not youth’s sourest grapes the best wine of our life? 
  Need he reckon his date by the Almanac’s measure
    Who is twenty life-long in the eyes of his wife? 
  Ah, Fate, should I live to be nonagenarian,
    Let me still take Hope’s frail I.O.U.s upon trust,
  Still talk of a trip to the Islands Macarian,
    And still climb the dream-tree for—­ashes and dust!

* * * * *

MR. BUCKLE AS A THINKER.

The recent death of Henry Thomas Buckle calls a new attention to his published works.  Pathetic it will seem to all that he should be cut off in the midst of labors so large, so assiduous and adventurous; and there are few who will not feel inclined to make up, as it were, to his memory for this untimely interruption of his pursuits, by assigning the highest possible value to his actual performance.  Additional strength will be given to these dispositions by the impressions of his personal character.  This was, indeed, such as to conciliate the utmost good-will.  If we except occasional touches of self-complacency, which betray, perhaps, a trifling foible, it may be said that everything is pleasing which is known concerning him.  His devotion, wellnigh heroic, to scholarly aims; his quiet studiousness; his filial virtue; his genial sociability, graced by, and gracing, the self-supporting habit of his soul; his intrepidity of intellect, matched by a beautiful boldness and openness in speech; the absence, too, from works so incisive, of a single trace of truculence:  all this will now be remembered; and those are unamiable persons, in whom the remembrance does not breed a desire to believe him as great in thought as he was brave, as prosperous in labor as he was persevering.