Call him not old, whose visionary brain
Holds o’er the past its undivided reign. 
For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul. 
If yet the minstrel’s song, the poet’s lay,
Spring with her birds, or children with their play,
Or maiden’s smile, or heavenly dream of art
Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart,—­
Turn to the record where his years are told,—­
Count his gray hairs,—­they cannot make him old!

End of the Professor’s paper.

[The above essay was not read at one time, but in several instalments, and accompanied by various comments from different persons at the table.  The company were in the main attentive, with the exception of a little somnolence on the part of the old gentleman opposite at times, and a few sly, malicious questions about the “old boys” on the part of that forward young fellow who has figured occasionally, not always to his advantage, in these reports.

On Sunday mornings, in obedience to a feeling I am not ashamed of, I have always tried to give a more appropriate character to our conversation.  I have never read them my sermon yet, and I don’t know that I shall, as some of them might take my convictions as a personal indignity to themselves.  But having read our company so much of the Professor’s talk about age and other subjects connected with physical life, I took the next Sunday morning to repeat to them the following poem of his, which I have had by me some time.  He calls it—­I suppose, for his professional friends—­the anatomist’s hymn, but I shall name it—­]

THE LIVING TEMPLE.

Not in the world of light alone,
Where God has built his blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker’s glory seen: 
Look in upon thy wondrous frame,—­
Eternal wisdom still the same!

The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves
Whose streams of brightening purple rush
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay
The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature’s flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart.

No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
Forever quivering o’er his task,
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then kindling each decaying part
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.

But warmed with that uchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason’s guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master’s own.