“Yea, those higher advantages which have somewhat both of truer and more lasting beauty in them, the endowments of wit, and learning, and eloquence, yea, and of moral goodness and virtue, yet they cannot rise above this world, they are still, in all their glory, but the _flower of grass_; their root is in the earth. When men have endured the toil of study night and day, it is but a small parcel of knowledge they can attend to, and they are forced to lie down in the dust in the midst of their pursuit of it; that head that lodges most sciences shall within a while be disfurnished of them all; and the tongue that speaks most languages be silenced.” [Illustration] Yes, and again I look at the jumble of common grass and flower of grass, and bright blossoms all withered, in which I am reclining, and think how our bright days and our commonplace days, our ordinary life and our pageants, fade into dulness even as we live on, and are all swept down at last, as it seems to a superficial thinker, into one common oblivion by Death. “What is become of all the pompous solemnities of kings and princes at their births and marriages, coronations and triumphs? They are now as a dream.” And so with our first flushes of success, our earliest tastes of fame, our new ecstasies of love, our wonders and admirations when life was young--where are they very soon? Lying in the mown ranks, void of their living movement and vivid lustre; numbered with the heap of every-day events and emotions; still distinguished from these, still marked as flowers, but the glory of them dried out under the air of use and the sun of experience. Precious they are still, and dear, but the dreams of youth are not to Age what Youth imagined them; the hay is valuable and sweet, but it is not that field which the least air could stir into a sea of silky light and shade, and a tossing of myriad colours. It was the Flower of grass, and it cannot be, on earth, but that “_the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away_.” “Would we consider this, in the midst of those varieties that toss our light minds to and fro, it would give us wiser thoughts, and ballast our hearts; make them more solid and stedfast in those spiritual endeavours which concern a durable condition, a being that abides for ever; in comparison of which the longest term of natural life is less than a moment, and the happiest estate is but a heap of miseries. Were all of us more constantly prosperous than any one of us is, yet that one thing were enough to cry down the price we put upon this life, that it continues not. As he answered to one who had a mind to flatter him in the midst of a pompous triumph, by saying, What is wanting here? _Continuance_, said he.”