_Hiatus valde lacrymabilis._
Time flies away fast,
The while we never remember
How soon our life here
Grows old with the year
That dies with the next December!
HERRICK.
I must pass over fourteen years, for were I to pursue the history of
our young Daniel's boyhood and adolescence into all the ramifications
which a faithful biography requires, fourteen volumes would not
contain it. They would be worth reading, for that costs little; they
would be worth writing, though that costs much. They would deserve the
best embellishments that the pencil and the graver could produce. The
most poetical of artists would be worthily employed in designing the
sentimental and melancholy scenes; Cruikshank for the grotesque;
Wilkie and Richter for the comic and serio-comic; Turner for the
actual scenery; Bewick for the head and tail pieces. They ought to be
written; they ought to be read. They should be written—and then they
would be read. But time is wanting:
_Eheu! fugaces Posthume, Posthume,
Labuntur anni!_
and time is a commodity of which the value rises as long as we live.
We must be contented with doing not what we wish, but what we can,—our
_possible_ as the French call it.
One of our Poets—(which is it?)—speaks of an _everlasting now_. If
such a condition of existence were offered to us in this world, and it
were put to the vote whether we should accept the offer and fix all
things immutably as they are, who are they whose voices would be given
in the affirmative?
Not those who are in pursuit of fortune, or of fame, or of knowledge,
or of enjoyment, or of happiness; though with regard to all of these,
as far as any of them are attainable, there is more pleasure in the
pursuit than in the attainment.
Not those who are at sea, or travelling in a stage coach.
Not the man who is shaving himself.
Not those who have the tooth ache, or who are having a tooth drawn.
The fashionable beauty might; and the fashionable singer, and the
fashionable opera dancer, and the actor who is in the height of his
power and reputation. So might the alderman at a city feast. So would
the heir who is squandering a large fortune faster than it was
accumulated for him. And the thief who is not taken, and the convict
who is not hanged, and the scoffer at religion whose heart belies his
tongue.
Not the wise and the good.
Not those who are in sickness or in sorrow.
Not I.
But were I endowed with the power of suspending the effect of time
upon the things around me, methinks there are some of my flowers which
should neither fall nor fade: decidedly my kitten should never attain
to cathood; and I am afraid my little boy would continue to “mis-speak
half-uttered words;” and never, while I live, outgrow that epicene
dress of French grey, half European, half Asiatic in its fashion.