The life of man would seem to be going all to wrack and pieces, and no instance of permanence and the ancient natural health, notwithstanding Burns, and Coleridge, and Carlyle. It will not do for men to die young; the greatest genius does not die young. Whom the gods love most do indeed die young, but not till their life is matured, and their years are like those of the oak, for they are the products half of nature and half of God. What should nature do without old men, not children but men? The life of men, not to become a mockery and a jest, should last a respectable term of years. We cannot spare the age of those old Greek Philosophers. They live long who do not live for a near end, who still forever look to the immeasurable future for their manhood. * * * * * All dramas have but one scene. There is but one stage for the peasant and for the actor, and both on the farm and in the theatre the curtain rises to reveal the same majestic scenery. The globe of earth is poised in space for his stage under the foundations of the theatre, and the cope of heaven, out of reach of the scene-shifter, overarches it. It is always to be remembered by the critic that all actions are to be regarded at last as performed from a distance upon some rood of earth and amid the operations of nature. Rabelais, too, inhabited the soil of France in sunshine and shade in those years; and his life was no "farce" after all. I seek the present time, No other clime, Life in to-day,— Not to sail another way,— To Paris or to Rome, Or farther still from home. That man, whoe'er he is, Lives but a moral death Whose life is not coeval With his breath. My feet forever stand On Concord fields, And I must live the life Which their soil yields. What are deeds done Away from home? What the best essay On the Ruins of Rome? The love of the new, The unfathomed blue, The wind in the wood, All future good, The sunlit tree, The small chickadee, The dusty highways, What Scripture says, This pleasant weather, And all else together, The river's meander, All things, in short, Forbid me to wander In deed or in thought. In cold or in drouth, Not seek the sunny South, But make my whole tour In the sunny present hour.