which weary you now about the War of 1812. It
will not be the same world then. Your children
will not be always children. Enjoy their fresh
youth while it lasts, for it will not last long.
Do not skim over the present too fast, through a constant
habit of onward-looking. Many men of an anxious
turn are so eagerly concerned in providing for the
future, that they hardly remark the blessings of the
present. Yet it is only because the future will
some day be present, that it deserves any thought at
all. And many men, instead of heartily enjoying
present blessings while they are present, train themselves
to a habit of regarding these things as merely the
foundation on which they are to build some vague fabric
of they know not what. I have known a clergyman,
who was very fond of music, and in whose church the
music was very fine, who seemed incapable of enjoying
its solemn beauty as a thing to be enjoyed while passing,
but who persisted in regarding each beautiful strain
merely as a promising indication of what his choir
would come at some future time to be. It is a
very bad habit, and one which grows, unless repressed.
You, my reader, when you see your children racing
on the green, train yourself to regard all that as
a happy end in itself. Do not grow to think merely
that those sturdy young limbs promise to be stout
and serviceable when they are those of a grown-up
man; and rejoice in the smooth little forehead with
its curly hair, without any forethought of how it is
to look some day when overshadowed (as it is sure
to be) by the great wig of the Lord Chancellor.
Good advice: let us all try to take it. Let
all happy things be not merely regarded as means,
but enjoyed as ends. Yet it is in the make of
our nature to be ever onward-looking; and we cannot
help it. When you get the first number for the
year of the magazine which you take in, you instinctively
think of it as the first portion of a new volume;
and you are conscious of a certain, though alight,
restlessness in the thought of a thing incomplete,
and of a wish that you had the volume completed.
And sometimes, thus looking onward into the future,
you worry yourself with little thoughts and cares.
There is that old dog: you have had him for many
years; he is growing stiff and frail; what are you
to do when he dies? When he is gone, the new dog
you get will never be like him; he may be, indeed,
a far handsomer and more amiable animal, but he will
not be your old companion; he will not be surrounded
with all those old associations, not merely with your
own by-past life, but with the lives, the faces, and
the voices of those who have left you, which invest
with a certain sacredness even that humble, but faithful
friend. He will not have been the companion of
your youthful walks, when you went at a pace which
now you cannot attain. He will just be a common
dog; and who that has reached your years cares for
that? The other, indeed, was a dog too;
but that was merely the substratum on which was accumulated