Let us, then, do our best to beat the Devil, and prepare for that Indian summer, which, with all respect to Shakespeare, is the true sixth age of man. And they reach it best (to judge by some who have got there) who do their daily work with a good conscience, share their incidental joys with others, and meet their troubles in the spirit of that stout old seaman, Sir Andrew Barton, as I the other day saw his ballad quoted with reference to R. L. Stevenson:--
A little Ime hurt, but yett not slaine; Ile but lye downe and bleede a while, And then Ile rise and fight againe.
_Now concernynge the Soule, it is a Queer Thynge consydering that it lives in the Bodie yett dieth nott; and so I conclude that the Soule was made separate, and thys Bodie for its brief use and tenement; and how it gets in and gets oute I cannot tell you. And belyke there bee all sortes and condiciones of Soules, some goode, some bad, some so-so; but because Goode is better than Evil, and because they lyve in Eternity, the bad Soules will finde itt oute in time, and become goode; and the so-so Soules will learn wisdome, and cease of their foolishnesse. But why they were nott alle made alyke to start, that I cannot tell you; nor juste how they was made._--THE SAGE'S OWNE BOKE.
It was a poetess, I am glad to say, and not a poet, who wrote the once popular lines:--
Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years! I am so weary of toil and of tears,-- Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,-- Take them, and give me my childhood again.
Many a voice no doubt sagged under this load of pathos as it read "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother" to a little group of sympathetic listeners; but if such melancholies are to be set on paper, and circulated in print, I am unchivalrous enough to wish that joyless occupation on the gentler sex. Most of us perform prodigies of toil, which seem to receive scant recompense, and shed figuratively many a bucket of seemingly useless tears. But I do not imagine that this sad poetess was half as badly off as she seemed to think; and, more than that, she had only to wait long enough, and keep alive long enough, to get her childhood back without asking for it. Time, the Groceryman, in due season would hand her a second childhood in many respects "just as good" as the first; for we who are betwixt and between can observe an unintelligent ignorance of later troubles in one condition, neatly balanced by an unintelligent forgetfulness of them in the other. Our lugubrious poetess, one might say, was neither more nor less than asking the tide of the years obligingly to assist her to commit suicide. Had her request been granted, there would have been one more child in the world--and one less poetess.