Mrs. Schimmelpenninck expresses her belief that in youth and middle age there is often a real conviction of the transitory nature of the most established temporal things, but that in old age it is not merely a conviction, but a vivid palpable reality, and that the eternal mountains do then indeed appear near at hand; while all the campaign around seems faded into shadowy distance; and she inclines to say, like the monk, who for forty years had exhibited the picture of the Last Supper, that he had seen so many pass away, that himself and those he spoke to seemed a shadow, while the blessed institution of the Holy Supper stood before him alone a reality. But many are the young hearts that feel as Margaret Hale felt, in Mrs. Gaskell’s story, when to her life seemed a vain show, so unsubstantial, and flickering, and fleeting, and when “it was as if from some aërial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!’” _Le tems même sera detruit_, as La Bruyère says: “ce n’est qu’un point dans les espaces immenses de l’éternité, et il sera effacé. Il y a de légères et frivoles circonstances du tems, qui ne sont pas stables, qui passent, et que j’appelle des modes, la grandeur, la faveur, les richesses, la puissance, l’autorité, l’indépendance, le plaisir, les joies, la superfluité. Que deviendront ces modes, quand le tems même aura disparu? La vertu seule, si peu à la mode, va au-delà des tems.” “Between two worlds life hovers like a star ’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge: How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lash’d from the foam of ages; while the graves Of empire heave but like some passing waves.” So writes Byron in the poem that contains perhaps his grandest and most powerful strains, interspersed among his wittiest and most wicked ones. If ever man was haunted by the conviction that we are shadows all, and that shadows are our pursuit, it was he. But with him there was nothing of a “saving faith” in this. As Shakspeare’s Prince of Arragon reads on the scroll at Belmont, “Some there be that shadows kiss; Such have but a shadow’s bliss;” and of such was Byron. And he knew it. Not more alive to this philosophy was Cowper himself, when he pictured men “For threescore years employed with ceaseless care In catching smoke and feeding upon air;” or when he pointed with this moral his lines on the felled poplars that once lent him a shade, beneath which he had so often been charmed by the blackbird’s sweet flowing ditty: “’Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can, To muse on the perishing pleasures of man; Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see, Have a being less durable even than he.”