A signal contrast the despairing minister presents to the poet’s picture of credulous hope which ever promises a morrow better than to-day (like the voluptuaries branded by the Hebrew prophet, who hug themselves in the assurance that To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant): ... “Credula vitam Spes fovet, ac melius cras fore semper ait.” They say that To-morrow never comes. The great Greek father with the golden mouth seems to have based an ethical warning on this thought, when he bids us defer not till to-morrow, for to-morrow is a vanishing quantity. Μὴ εἰς τὴν αὔριον ἀναβάλλου· ἡ γὰρ αὔριον οὐδέ ποτε λαμβάνει τέγος. The moral is one with that of the Latin satirist—though _he_ makes to-morrow come fast enough, one _per diem_,—and go quite as fast as it came: ... “Cum lux altera venit, Jam cras hesternum consumpsimus; ecce aliud cras Egerit hys annos.” Matter-of-fact people will tell you that To-morrow does come, and fix by their stop-watch the instant of its arrival. Nay, they can appeal to the _primus inter poetas_ for poetical verification of their view. Says the Messenger to the Provost, while it is yet dark, on the morning which is appointed to be Claudio’s last, “Good morrow; for, as I take it, it is almost day.” And so with the peers who enter sleepless King Henry’s chamber, at the hour they name: “_Warwick._ Many good morrows to your majesty. _K. Hen._ Is it good morrow, lords? _War._ ’Tis one o’clock, and past. _K. Hen._ Why then, good morrow to you all, my lords.” But, in its own sense, the saying holds good, and is good sense too, that To-morrow never comes. One might take for emblem of its import the touching story told by Southey, of a lady on the point of marriage, whose affianced husband usually travelled by the stage-coach to visit her, and who, going one day to meet him, found instead of her betrothed an old friend, despatched to announce to her his sudden death. She uttered a scream, and piteously exclaimed, “He is dead!” But then all consciousness of the affliction that had befallen her ceased. From that fatal moment she had daily, for fifty years, at the time Dr. Uwins wrote, and “in all seasons, traversed the distance of a few miles, where she expected her future husband to alight from the coach; and every day [adds the doctor, writing in the then present tense] she utters in a plaintive tone, “He is not come yet! I will return to-morrow.” _To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow_—that to her never was, but always was to be.