Is not to-day enough? why do I peer
Into the darkness of the day to come?
Is not to-morrow e'en as yesterday?
Relics of Shelley.
May I not leave them here? Where could I leave them better than on this
marble threshold of a promising boyhood; still happy and noble in the
freshness of their feelings, the brightness of their hopes, the
enthusiasm of their thoughts? Need I say a word of after-life, with the
fading of its earlier visions, and the coldness and hardness of its
ways? I should like to linger with them here; to shake hands here in
farewell, and leave them as the boys I knew. They are living still, and
are happy and highly honoured in the world. In their case "the boy has
been father to the man;" and the reader who has understood and
sympathised with them in their early life will not ask me to draw aside
the curtain, even for a moment, to show them as they appeared when a few
more summers had seen them grow to the full stature of their manhood.