“Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich Bronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a gray hair, A single one,—I saw it; otherwise The woman looked immortal.” It is among the graver of his Recreations that a clerical essayist pictures to himself man or woman, thoughtful, earnest, and pious, sitting down and musing, at the sight of the first gray hairs. Here is the slight shadow, he puts it, of “a certain great event which is to come;” the earliest touch of a chill hand which must prevail at length. “Here is manifest decay: we have begun to die. And no worthy human being will pretend that this is other than a very solemn thought. And we look backward as well as forward: how short a time since we were little children, and kind hands smoothed down the locks now grown scanty and gray.” So in Mrs. Southey’s (Caroline Bowles’) tender, simple verses on the same trite theme:— “Some there were took fond delight, Sporting with these tresses bright, To enring with living gold Fingers now beneath the mould (Woe is me!) grown icy cold. ... Now again a shining streak ’Gins the dusky cloud to break;— Here and there a glittering thread Lights the ringlets, dark and dead— Glittering light!—but pale and cold— Glittering thread!—but _not_ of _gold_. Silent warning! silvery streak! Not unheeded dost thou speak. Not with feelings light and vain, Not with fond, regretful pain, Look I on the token sent To declare the day far spent.” Mr. Thackeray makes his youngish widow, Amelia Osborne, take tranquilly enough this sort of revelation. “In these quiet labours and harmless cares the gentle widow’s life was passing away, a silver hair or two marking the progress of time on her head, and a line deepening ever so little on her fair forehead. She used to smile at these marks of time.” Which accords with her placid temperament. Quite otherwise constituted is Currer Bell’s Madame Beck. “A loud bell rang for morning school. She got up. As she passed a dressing-table with a glass upon it, she looked at her reflected image. One single white hair streaked her nut-brown tresses; she plucked it out with a shudder.” That is an early phase of the decadence of which Mr. Robert Browning graphically depicts a later stage:— “One day, as the lady saw her youth Depart, and the silver thread that streaked Her hair, and, worn by the serpent’s tooth, The brow so puckered, the chin so peaked— She wondered who the woman was, So hollow-eyed and haggard-cheeked.”