of your mind. Passion and anger make a man unfit for everything that becomes him as a man or as a Christian."

The fact is, maintains the author of "The Gentle Life," all hard words are a mistake: most of our quarrels arise from a total misunderstanding of each other; and at any rate, hard words will not mend the matter. One might as well, he says, try to mend glass windows by pelting them with stones. Soft words, on the other hand, fall like a healing balm on the hearts of all. "Such power," in the words of one who loved to be written, if not to write himself, Leontius, "such power has the least shadow of a pleasant speech, to do away an ill-feeling of the moment, in the complacency it produces, both in the giver and receiver." To apply, again, a passage from Spenser, descriptive of a damsel's success in deterring two doughty knights from mortal encounter, so effective was her speech to

"calm the sea of their tempestuous spite :

Such power have pleasing words! Such is the might
Of courteous clemency in gentle heart!"

We are all of us fond of gentle words, once more to quote an ex titulo authority on all that concerns gentle living; and he denies the truth of the common rough proverb, "Soft words butter no parsnips," which is shown to be, after all, an apologetic proverb, meaning that the hearer is tickled with the politeness, albeit real satisfaction is not yet made. "Soft words do butter parsnips; and many an oily fellow, whose talent, industry, and conscientiousness are small, owes his position and advancement in life to the soft words which drop continually from his mouth." The soft answer that avails to dispel wrath, comes of practised patience; and when patience has its perfect work, it works miracles, as detailed by that fine old forgotten poet, Decker :

:

"It is the greatest enemy to law

That can be, for it doth embrace all wrongs,

And so chains up lawyers and women's tongues;

And last of all, to end a household strife,
It is the honey 'gainst a waspish wife."

This reminds us of a passage in "The Gordian Knot," where the gentle laying of a husband's hand in an irritated wife's, or vice versa, is recommended (by example) as a good plan to adopt in conjugal discussions when differences arise. The tongue, says our author, is very proud, abominably proud and sulky, and often refuses to say what the heart desires should be said; but the fingers know their duty, and are ready to convey an apologetic or forgiving pressure, which, he makes bold to assert, "will stop ninety-nine quarrels out of a hundred, if the parties love one another."

The greatest, widest, deepest of all observers of human nature puts into the mouth of one of the sagest of kings this counsel to a younger son, in respect to his bearing towards the elder :

"Blunt not his love;

For he is gracious, if he be observed ; *

Yet notwithstanding, being incensed, he's flint :

As humorous as winter, and as sudden

As flawst congealed in the spring of day.

His temper, therefore, must be well observed:
Chide him for faults, and do it reverently,

When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth :
But being moody, give him line and scope;
Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working."

In a later one, again, of his noble series of English history plays-indeed the latest-Shakspeare makes a ducal politician, astute in practical psychology as well as in politics, utter this apophthegm, of his own coinage :—

"Anger is like

A full-hot horse, who being allowed his way,
Self-mettle tires him."

* That is, if attention be shown him.

+ Gusts of wind.

A TWICE-TOLD TALE OF YEARS.

ECCLESIASTES vi. 6.

HE preacher, whose text was Vanity of vanities, all is THE vanity, pictures in one section of his homily a man who has lived many years, so that the days of his years be many," but whose soul is not filled with good, but aches rather with a gnawing sense of emptiness, so that his many years, gloomy as they have been, are all too few. "Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good : do not all go to one place?" What more tedious than such a twicetold tale of years? Yet, to look back upon, how fleet their transit, how imperceptible their lapse, how petty the sum of them! That tale is soon told, even if told twice.

The days of our life are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; nor do the fourscore seem longer to the retrospective reviewer than do to the sexagenarian his sixty years, or to the septuagenarian his threescore and ten. The most popular of contemporary authors describes a man of seventy-eight, of whom a loveless, sad-hearted questioner asks whether his seventy-eight years would not be seventy-eight heavy curses, if he could say to himself, as the questioner can, "I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by." The Royal Preacher would apply context as well as text to such a retrospect, with an "I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known anything this hath more rest than the other. Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good."

The same questioner, already cited, asks the same old man if his childhood seems far off,-if the days when he sat at his mother's knee seem days of very long ago? To which

the experience of threescore and eighteen years gives this reply: "Twenty years back, yes: at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning." But he is not one to feel and say with the French cynic, "Mais enfin la vie se passe, et mourir après s'être amusé ou s'être ennuyé dix ou vingt ans, c'est la même chose." He has not so learned life, and the meaning of life, and its purpose, and its end.

Infinite is the swiftness of time, says Seneca, as seen by those who are looking back at time past. Infinita est velocitas Looked forward to,

temporis, quæ magis apparet respicientibus.

it is another matter altogether. As Cowper has it, when retracing the windings of his way through many years,

"Short as in retrospect the journey seems,

It seemed not always short; the rugged path,

And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn,

Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length.”

But as Cowper elsewhere draws the contrast, in the Latin motto he wrote for the king's clock,—

'Quæ lenta accedit, quam velox præterit hora!"

(Slow comes the hour; its passing speed how great !—so Hayley Englished the line.) "Since this new epoch in my life," writes Schleiermacher on a certain occasion, "time seems to fly twice as quickly as before, and I can quite fancy that when Jatte and I are grown old and grey, we shall still feel as if only a few days had gone by." Moore was in his sixtieth year when Lord John Russell talked with him of the speed with which time seems to fly; and Moore records in his Diary the question he put, If you find it so now, what will you say of it when you are as old as I am?" The "peculiar melancholy" of the answer given is emphasised in the same journal.

Another retrospective reviewer pictures our race as struggling ever onward, toiling up towards some air-built goal never to be attained-while the past crumbles instantly away behind our steps, like the staircase of the Epicurean, as we advance in our progress; and every step, which was of such magnitude

when we passed it, is forgotten in the "collectiveness of retrospection," insomuch that at times a passing thought would compass the events of years.

Few and evil the patriarch declares the days of the years of his pilgrimage to have been, when, in answer to Pharaoh's "How old art thou?" the answer is, A hundred and thirty years. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, said another patriarch, and full of trouble. His days are swifter than a post, they flee away, they see no good. They are passed away as the swift ships; they are swifter than a weaver's shuttle. Festinat enim decurrere velox Flosculus angustæ miseraque brevissima vita Portio. And thus in Juvenal's pregnant phrase, obrepit non intellecta senectus. Or, as with the ageing subject of the Three Warnings,—

"Old Time whose haste no mortal spares,
Uncalled, unheeded, unawares,

Brought him on his eightieth year."

We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told. In one of his letters to his old friend Mrs. Hughes, Southey commences a paragraph with the truism, "The last twenty years, to you and me, are but as yesterday ;" and he adds, that if we could but bring ourselves to feel, as truly as we know, that the next twenty years are but as to-morrow, that feeling, with a trust in God's mercy, would be sufficient consolation under all sorrows. Half a year later we find him writing to her in the same strain: "It seems but as yesterday when I look back twenty, thirty, forty, and even more years; the end, therefore, of my mortal term would seem but as to-morrow if it were rightly looked on to. A little while, and we shall be young again, beyond all power of time and change, with those whom we love, and to continue with them for ever and ever." Madame de Sévigné utters her pure French hélas ! over the like retrospect of twenty years: "Hélas! est-il possible qu'il y ait vingt-un ans? il me esembleque ce fut l'année passée; mais je juge, par le peu que m'a duré ce temps, ce que me paraîtront les années qui viendront encore." Home, straight home