Once more I had sunshine. The clouds seemed to depart as suddenly

as they had risen, and that same rejoicing and rosy light which had

encircled the brow of manhood at its dawn long shrouded, seemingly

lost for ever, and swallowed up in darkness--came out as softly

and quietly in the maturer day, as if its sweet serene had never

known even momentary obscuration.

Love, verily, is the purple light of youth. If it abides, blessing

and blessed, with the unsophisticated heart, youth never leaves

us. Gray brows make not age--the feeble step, the wrinkled visage,

these indicate the progress of time, but not the passage of youth.

Happy hearts keep us in perpetual spring, and the glow of childhood

without its weaknesses is ours to the final limit of seventy. The

sense of desolation, the pang of denial, the baffled hope, and the

defrauded love, these constitute the only age that should ever give

the heart a pang. I can fancy a good man advancing through all the

mortal stages from seventeen to seventy-five, and crowned by the

sympathies of corresponsive affections, simply going on from youth

to youth, ending at last in youth's perfect immortality!

The hope of this--not so much a hope as an instinct--is the faith

of our boyhood. The boy, as the father of the man, transmits this

hope to riper years; but if the experience of the day correspond

not with the promise of the dawn, how rapidly old age comes upon

us! White hairs, lean cheeks, withered muscles, feeble steps, and

that dull, dead feeling about the heart--that utter abandonment

of cheer--which would be despair were it not for a certain blunted

sensibility--a sort of drowsy indifference to all things that the

day brings forth, which, as it takes from life the excitement of

every passion, leaves it free from the sting of any. Yet, were not

the tempest better than the calm? Who would not prefer to be driven

before the treacherous hurricane of the blue gulf, than to linger

midway on its shoreless waters, and behold their growing stagnation

from day to day? The apathy of the passions is the most terrible

form in which age makes its approaches.

With an earnest, sanguine temperament, such as mine, there is

little danger of such apathy, The danger is not from lethargy but

madness. I had escaped this danger. It was surprising, even to

myself, how suddenly my spirits had arisen from the pressure that

had kept them down. In a moment, as it were, that mocking troop

of fears and sorrows which environed me, took their departure. It

seemed that it was only necessary for me to know that I was about

to lose the presence of William Edgerton to find this relief.

And yet, how idle! With an intense egoisme, such as mine, I should

conjure up an Edgerton in the deepest valleys of our country.

We have our gods and devils in our own hearts. The nature of the

deities we worship depends upon our own. In a savage state, the

Deity is savage, and expects bloody sacrifices; with the progress

of civilization his attributes incline to mercy. The advent of Jesus

Christ indicated the advance of the Hebrews to a higher sense of

the human nature. It was the advent of the popular principle, which

has been advancing steadily ever since and keeping due pace with

the progress of Christian education. The people were rising at the

expense of the despotism which had kept them down. It does not affect

the truth of this to show that the polish of the Jewish nation was

lessened at this period. Nay, rather proves it, since the diffusion

of a truth or a power must always lessen its intensity In teaching,

for the first time, the doctrine of the soul's immortality, the

Savior laid the foundation of popular rights, in the elevation of

the common humanity--since he thus showed the equal importance, in

the sight of God, of every soul that had ever taken shape beneath

his hands.




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