touch, death to that day, a Beard! A Beard! fair reader, as rough as the brush-naughty little mermaid-with which you keep combing your glossy locks in that mirror-no, you do not think it flatters-both before you "lie down in your loveliness," and after you rise up in it,-alarmed by the unexpected and apparently endless ringing of the breakfast bell.

Yet, we are not so very much of a Quiz after all; and considering how the storms of so many seasons have beat against us, it is astonishing how well we wear, both in root, branch, and stem. We cannot help-in our pride-Heaven forgive and pity us!-sometimes likening ourselves to an old Ash beside a Church. There stands the tree, with bark thick as cork, and hard as iron-hoary arms overshadowing with a pleasant glimmer-for his leaves are beautiful as those of some little plant, come late and go early, and are never so umbrageous as to exclude the blue sky-overshadowing with a pleasant glimmer a whole family of tombstones,-stem with difficulty circled by the united arm-lengths of some half-dozen schoolboys, never for a day satisfied, without, during a pause of their play, once more measuring the giant,-roots, many of them visible like cables along the gravel-walk leading from the kirkyard-gate, where on Sabbath stands the elder beside the plate, and each Christian passing by droppeth in the tinkling charity, from rich man's gold to widow's mite-and many of them hidden, and then reappearing far off from among the graves-while the tap-root, that feeds and upholds all the visible glory, hath for ages struck through the very rock-foundation of the humble house of the Most High! Solemn image! and never to be by us remembered but through a haze of tears! How kindred the nature of mirth and melancholy! What resemblance seemeth that tree now to have to a poor, world-wearied, and almost life-sick old man! For in a few short years more we shall have passed away like a shadow, and shall no more be anywhere found; but Thou, many and many a midsummer, while centuries run their course, wilt hang thy pensive, "thy dim religious light" -over other and other generations, while at that mystic and awful table, whiter than the unstained mountain-snow, sit almost in the open air, for the heavens are seen in their beauty through the open roof of that living temple, the children of the hamlet and the hall, partaking of the sacrament,—or, ere

that holiest rite be solemnised in simplicity, all listening to the eloquence of some grey-haired man inspired by his great goodness, and with the Bible open before him, making, feeble as he seemed an hour ago before he walked up into the Tent, the hearts of the whole congregation to burn within them, and the very circle of the green hills to ring with joy!

What a blessed order of Nature it is that the footsteps of Time are "inaudible and noiseless," and that the seasons of life are like those of the year, so indistinguishably brought on, in gentle progress, and imperceptibly blended the one with the other, that the human being scarcely knows, except from a faint and not unpleasant feeling, that he is growing old! The boy looks on the youth, the youth on the man, the man in his prime on the grey-headed sire, each on the other, as on a separate existence in a separate world. It seems sometimes as if they had no sympathies, no thoughts in common,—that each smiled and wept on account of things for which the other cared not, and that such smiles and tears were all foolish, idle, and most vain; but as the hours, days, weeks, months, and years go by, how changes the one into the other, till, without any violence, lo! as if close together at last, the cradle and the grave! In this how Nature and Man agree, pacing on and on to the completion of a year-of a life! The Spring how soft and tender indeed, with its buds and blossoms, and the blessedness of the light of heaven so fresh, young, and new-a blessedness to feel, to hear, to see, and to breathe! Yet the Spring is often touched by frost-as if it had its own Winter, and is felt to urge and be urged on upon that Summer, of which the green earth, as it murmurs, seems to have some secret forethought. The Summer, as it lies on the broad blooming bosom of the earth, is yet faintly conscious of the coming-on of Autumn with "sere and yellow leaf," the sunshine owns the presence of the shade—and there is at times a pause as of melancholy amid the transitory mirth! Autumn comes with its full or decaying ripeness, and its colours grave or gorgeous-the noise of song and sickle-of the wheels of wains-and all the busy toils of prophetic man gathering up, against the bare cold Winter, provision for the body and for the soul! Winter! and cold and bare as fancy pictured-yet not without beauty and joy of its own, while something belonging to the other seasons that are fled, some

gleamings as of spring-light, and flowers fair as of Spring among the snow-meridians bright as Summer morns, and woods bearing the magnificent hues of Autumn on into the Christmas frost-clothe the Old Year with beauty and with glory, not his own-and just so with Old Age, the Winter, the last season of man's ever-varying yet never wholly changed Life!

Then blessings on the Sages and the Bards who, in the strength of the trust that was within them, have feared not to crown Old Age with a diadem of flowers and light! Shame on the satirists, who, in their vain regret and worse ingratitude, have sought to strip it of all "impulses of soul and sense,' and leave it a sorry and shivering sight, almost too degraded for pity's tears! True, that to outward things the eye may be dim, the ear deaf, and the touch dull; but there are lights that die not away with the dying sunbeams-there are sounds that cease not when the singing of birds is silent—there are motions that still stir the soul, delightful as the thrill of a daughter's hand pressing her father's knee in prayer; and therefore, how calm, how happy, how reverend, beneath unoffended Heaven, is the head of Old Age! Walk on the mountain, wander down the valley, enter the humble hut,the scarcely less humble kirk,—and you will know how sacred a thing is the hoary hair that lies on the temples of him who, during his long journey, forgot not his Maker, and feels that his Old Age shall be renewed into immortal youth!

"That strain I heard was of a higher mood!"

But now we must wake a lowlier measure; and, gentle reader! thou wilt not refuse to go with us, who, in comparison with thee, are old, for thou art in thy prime—and be not, we implore thee, a prodigal of its blessings—into the little humming-room, whose open window looks over the lilacs and laburnums now in all their glory almost painful to look on, so dazzling are they in their blue and yellow burnished array-and while away an hour with-start not at the name-the very living flesh-and-blood Christopher North, whose voice has often been with thee, as the voice of a solemn or sportive spirit, when rivers and seas rolled and flowed between, he lying under the Birch-tree's, and thou, perhaps, under the Banana's shade! Let us both be silent. Look at

those faces on the wall-how mild! how meek! how magnificent! You know them, by an instinct for beauty and grandeur, to be the Shadows of the Spirits whose works have sanctified your sleeping and your waking dreams. The great poets!-Ay, you may gaze till twilight on that bust! Blind Melesigenes!-But hark! the front-door bell is ringing-then tap, tap, tap, tap-and lo! a bevy of beauty, matrons, and maids, who have all been a-Maying, and come to lay their wreaths and garlands at the old man's feet! Is our Age deserted and forsaken-childless, wifeless though it be for the whole world knows that we are a bachelor-when subjected, in the benignity of Providence, to such visionary visitations as these? Visionary call them not-though lovelier than poet's dreams beside the Castalian fountain-for these are living locks of auburn braided over a living brow of snow-these tresses, black in their glossy richness as the raven's wing, are no work of glamoury-no shadow She with the light-blue laughing eyes-She, whose dark orbs are filled with the divine melancholy of genius,

"Like Lady of the Mere,

Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,"

bears, in her soul-fraught beauty, a soft, sweet, familiar Christian name-but, lo! like fair sea-birds, they all gather together, floating round the Lord of the Mansion;-and is not Buchanan Lodge the happiest, the pleasantest of dwellings, and old Christopher North the happiest and the pleasantest of men?

Perhaps, to see and hear us in another character of our perfection, you should mistake the gateway of the Lodge for that of some other sylvan abode, and come upon us as we are sitting under the blossom-fall of a laburnum; or lying carelessly diffused in a small circle of flower-fringed greensward, like Love among the roses. Our face, then, has no expression but that of mildness-you see a man who would not hurt even a wasp-our intellectual is merged, not lost, in our moral being-and if you have read Tacitus, you feel the full meaning of his beautiful sentence about Agricola,—“ Bonum virum facile crederes, magnum libenter."

Awaking sufficiently to see that some one is present before us, we motion the light or shadow to lie down, and begin

conversing so benignly and so wisely, that the stranger feels at home as if in his birthplace, even as a son returned from afar to his father. The cheerful stillness of the retirement, for there is no stir but of birds and bees,-the sea-murmur is not heard to-day, and the city bells are silent,-is felt to be accordant with the spirit of our green old age, and as the various philosophy of human life overflows the garden, our visitor regards us now as the indolent and indulgent Epicurus -now as the severe and searching Stagyrite-now as the Poet-Sage, on whose lips in infancy fell that shower of bees, the Divine Plato-now Pythagoras, the silent and the silencing-now "that old man eloquent," Socrates, the loving and beloved; and unconsciously at the close of some strain of our discourse he recites to himself that fine line of Byron,

"Well hast thou said, Athena's wisest son!"

Or, were you to fall in with us as we were angling our way down the Tweed, on some half-spring half-summer day, some day so made up of cloud and sunshine that you know not whether it be light or dark,—

“That beautiful uncertain weather,

When gloom and glory meet together,”

some day, when at this hour the air is alive with dancing insects, and at that every gauzy and gaudy winglet hushed -some day on which you could wander wild as a red deer over the high mountains and by the shores of the long-winding loch, or sit fixed as the cushat in the grove, and eye the ruins of an old castle ;—were you to fall in with us on such a forenoon, by the pool below Nidpath, or the meadow-mound of sweet Cardrona-mains, or the ford of Traquair, near the lively Inverleithen, or the sylvan dens of Dryburgh, or the rocky rushings of the Trows, or-But sit down beneath the umbrage of that sycamore-Heavens! what a tree !—and be thou Charles Cotton and we Isaac Walton, and let both of us experience that high and humane delight which youth and age do mutually communicate, when kindness is repaid with gratitude, and love with reverence.

Yet even as we hobble along the City street-the street of Princes-with one or two filial youngsters at our side-for old men are our aversion, so nut-deaf are they, so sand-blind,