Chactas, the blind old sachem in Chateaubriand’s Wertherian romance, is made to bring that once enthusiastically admired story to an end by relating a parable to his woe-fraught young listener. It tells how the Meschacebé, soon after leaving its source among the hills, began to feel weary of being a simple brook; and so asked for snows from the mountains, water from the torrents, rain from the tempests; until, its petitions granted, it burst its bounds, and ravaged its hitherto delightsome banks. At first the proud stream exulted in its force; but seeing ere long that it carried desolation in its flow, that its progress was now doomed to solitude, and that its waters were for ever turbid, it came to regret the humble bed hollowed out for it by nature,—the birds, the flowers, the trees, and the brooks, hitherto the modest companions of its tranquil course. The moral of the myth of Tithonus is one for all time. Mr. Tennyson has pointed it for ours. He shows us in Tithonus a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream the ever silent spaces of the East; and from this grey shadow, once a man, the wailing utterance of a sad story comes:— “I ask’d thee, ‘Give me immortality.’ Then didst thou grant my asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills, And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me, And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d To dwell in presence of immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes.... ... Let me go: take back thy gift: Why should a man desire in any way To vary from the kindly race of men, Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance Where all should pass, as is most meet for all? ... Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears, And make me tremble lest a saying learnt, In days far off, on that dark earth, be true? ‘The gods themselves cannot recal their gifts.’” “_AND HE DIED._” GENESIS v. _passim_. Well known is Addison’s reference to an eminent man in the Romish Church, who upon reading in the Book of Genesis how that all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died; and all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died; and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty nine years, and he died;—immediately shut himself up in a convent, an absolute recluse from the world, as not thinking anything in this life worth pursuing, which had not regard to another. What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death? “Dead!—Man’s ‘I was,’ by God’s ‘I am’— All hero-worship comes to that. High heart, high thought, high fame, as flat As a gravestone. Bring your _Jacet jam_— The epitaph’s an epigram.” So writes Mrs. Browning. And thus writes Barry Cornwall, on the same trite text; it is the last stanza of the History of a Life, and of a successful one:—