“Senex” has seen three generations grow up, the son repeating the virtues and the failings of the father, the grandson showing the same characteristics as the father and grandfather.  He knows that if such or such a young fellow had lived to the next stage of life he would very probably have caught up with his mother’s virtues, which, like a graft of a late fruit on an early apple or pear tree, do not ripen in her children until late in the season.  He has seen the successive ripening of one quality after another on the boughs of his own life, and he finds it hard to condemn himself for faults which only needed time to fall off and be succeeded by better fruitage.  I cannot help thinking that the recording angel not only drops a tear upon many a human failing, which blots it out forever, but that he hands many an old record-book to the imp that does his bidding, and orders him to throw that into the fire instead of the sinner for whom the little wretch had kindled it.

“And pitched him in after it, I hope,” said Number Seven, who is in some points as much of an optimist as any one among us, in spite of the squint in his brain,—­or in virtue of it, if you choose to have it so.

“I like Wordsworth’s ‘Matthew,’” said Number Five, “as well as any picture of old age I remember.”

“Can you repeat it to us?” asked one of The Teacups.

“I can recall two verses of it,” said Number Five, and she recited the two following ones.  Number Five has a very sweet voice.  The moment she speaks all the faces turn toward her.  I don’t know what its secret is, but it is a voice that makes friends of everybody.

  “’The sighs which Matthew heaved were sighs
   Of one tired out with fun and madness;
   The tears which came to Matthew’s eyes
   Were tears of light, the dew of gladness.

  “’Yet, sometimes, when the secret cup
   Of still and serious thought went round,
   It seemed as if he drank it up,
   He felt with spirit so profound:’ 

“This was the way in which Wordsworth paid his tribute to a

  “‘Soul of God’s best earthly mould.’”

The sweet voice left a trance-like silence after it, which may have lasted twenty heart-beats.  Then I said, We all thank you for your charming quotation.  How much more wholesome a picture of humanity than such stuff as the author of the “Night Thoughts” has left us: 

  “Heaven’s Sovereign saves all beings but Himself
   That hideous sight, a naked human heart.”

Or the author of “Don Juan,” telling us to look into

  “Man’s heart, and view the hell that’s there!”

I hope I am quoting correctly, but I am more of a scholar in Wordsworth than in Byron.  Was Parson Young’s own heart such a hideous spectacle to himself?

If it was, he had better have stripped off his surplice.  No,—­it was nothing but the cant of his calling.  In Byron it was a mood, and he might have said just the opposite thing the next day, as he did in his two descriptions of the Venus de’ Medici.  That picture of old Matthew abides in the memory, and makes one think better of his kind.  What nobler tasks has the poet than to exalt the idea of manhood, and to make the world we live in more beautiful?