the days when Lincoln was President, like those which
weary you now about the Declaration of Independence.
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 tiling 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 over-shadowed (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 enjoyed as ends, as well as regarded
as means. 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 slight restlessness
in the thought of a thing incomplete, and of a wish
that you had the volume completed. And sometimes,
thus locking onward into the future, you worry yourself
with litile thoughts and cares. There is that
old dog: you Lave had him for many years; he
is growing stiff and frail; what arc 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
saeredness 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