forever?  Very, very few of us can join in Sir Boyle Roche’s blundering sneer at posterity, and with the hope of immortality mingles a dread of utter oblivion here.  Will it not be consoling, standing close by the graves which have been prepared for us, to leave the world some little legacy of wisdom sedulously gleaned from the fields of the fading past,—­some intangible, but honest wealth, the not altogether worthless accumulation of an humble, but earnest life,—­something which may lighten the load of a sad experience, illuminate the dark hours which as they have come to all must come to all through all the ages, or at least divert without debauching the mind of the idler, the trifler, and the macaroni?  I believe this ingenuous feeling to be very far removed from the wheezy aspirations of windy ignorance, or the spasms for fame which afflict with colic the bowels, empty and flatulent, of sheer scribblers and dunces who take a mean advantage of the invention of printing.  Let us be tender of the honest gentlemen who, to quote Cervantes, “aim at somewhat, but conclude nothing.”  I cannot smile at the hopes of the boy Burns,—­

  “That he, for poor auld Scotland’s sake,
  Some usefu’ plan or beuk could make,
  Or sing a sang at least.”

And while I am in a humor for quotation, I must give you this muscular verse from Henry More’s “Platonic Song of the Soul":—­

  “Their rotten relics lurk close under ground;
  With living weight no sense or sympathy
  They have at all; nor hollow thundering sound
  Of roaring winds that cold mortality
  Can wake, ywrapt in sad Fatality: 
  To horse’s hoof that beats his grassie dore
  He answers not:  the moon in silency
  Doth passe by night, and all bedew him o’er
  With her cold, humid rayes; but he feels not Heaven’s power.”

How we shiver in the icy, midnight moonbeams of the recluse of Christ’s College!  How preciously golden seem the links of our universal brotherhood, when the Fates are waving their dark wings around us, and menace us with their sundering!  I am not sure, my worthy Wagonero, that, rather than see my own little cord finally cut, I would not consent to be laughed at by a dozen generations, in the hope that it might happen to me that the thirteenth, out of sheer weariness at the prolonged lampooning, might grow pitiful at my purgatorial experiences, and so betake itself to nursing and fondling me into repute, furnishing me with half-a-dozen of those lynx-eyed commentators who would discern innumerable beauties and veracities through the calfskin walls of my beatified bantling.  They might find, at last, that I had “the gold-strung harp of Apollo” and played a “most excellent diapason, celestial music of the spheres,”—­hearing the harmony

  “As plainly as ever Pythagoras did,”

when “Venus the treble ran sweet division upon Saturn the bass.”